Tag: baking

breaking with tradition

every year, towards the end of December, I buy a bag of cranberries. I don’t know why – I don’t like cranberry sauce, and anyway, we always eat goose for our festive dinner, but there you go; it’s part of the Christmas Tradition.

and so, towards the end of February, we generally have an equally traditional Throwing Away of the Cranberries (Mouldy).

but this year, things were different. I found this recipe for Christmas Morning Muffins, and I did indeed make them for Christmas morning, and they were delicious, and we snarfed the lot. And then I made some more a couple of weeks later.

earlier this week, I discovered the last of the cranberries at the back of the fridge, and last night we made *more muffins* with them. And now they are all gone (the cranberries, that is; there are still some muffins left), and I have none to throw away in a week’s time. I’m quite sad about that in a way, but I think now I can move on, don’t you?

sausage rolls


sausage rolls
Originally uploaded by ramtops.

I’m a good cook, but I’m not great at baking. And I’m lousy at pastry.

however, inspired by this recipe which claimed to be “easy flaky pastry”, I thought I’d give it a go.

I had to get perlmonger to come and grate for a while – it was hard work. But *I* rolled out the pastry, and rolled out the sausage meat, and brushed it all with eggy stuff, and put it in the oven, and baked them. And they were *gorgeous*.

the sage plant in the garden had died, so I made do with some rosemary, and a hefty grating of nutmeg.

go me, I think. And we only ate three – the rest have gone in the freezer.

Stepford Wife

today, I have been mostly baking. I made a fabulous gruyere and cracked peppercorn bread. Or, at least, it would have been fabulous had I had a decent loaf tin instead of the ancient old things I use. It wasn’t /quite/ cooked through, but we toasted it, and it was delicious.

and I made some shortbread bikkies, and cut them out with my festering xmas tree and star cutters. And I made some walnut shortbread, and cut them out ditto, except the recipe said to leave the dough in the fridge for half and hour,and I left it in there for about 5 hours, and had to soften it all up again. But they’re out of the oven now, and they’re gorgeous. I’m going to bung a bit of icing and some glittery balls [fnaar] on the shortbreads tomorrow.

tomorrow – marzipan the cake, have a bash at sausage rolls {dear god – pastry; I can’t do pastry …), maybe some banana muffins.

I got Pete to drive me up to the Kitchen Shop this afternoon (I can’t park the Thaab, try as I might) and bought two new loaf tins, and another heavy duty baking tray – now I’m doing lots of this stuff, I want better quality tins, cos it makes all the difference.

and we called in at the local off licence on the way home and picked up 26 bottles of wine (including some vintage Pelorus – hurrah, and some pink fizz just for kalunina. There are six assorted bottles of fizz on the top row of the wine rack, which should do us through to next year.)

now I’m sitting here while perlmonger cooks me a lump of Dexter steak before settling down to the X-Factor (which the Tivo is recording.

all recipes are on Nibblous, should you be interested.