Belated baking

So it's days and days after Christmas, but I'm getting around to the Christmas Baking post. It's 39 degrees celcius outside today, so the only gardening going on is lots of water to keep the plants alive (tomorrow - NYE - is forecast a whopping 43 degrees celcius).
So, as you might have gathered, Christmas to me means going crazy in the kitchen. I like to give baked goods as gifts.


SP helped in her own way.


This year I started with orange and pistachio biscotti, and almond biscotti.


Then I made Viennese fingers (recipe)


And Viennese 'drops' too.


The cookie trees were a bit of a hit. I was going to do all vanilla cookies (recipe), and then I got bored and added in gingerbread too, all iced with lemon icing.


The leftover biscuits made a bigger tree, which we took to my mother-in-law's house for her annual Christmas Eve birthday party.




D made his famous Christmas puddings.


He also used my leftover biscuit dough to make pastry for mince pies by re-kneading the dough with an egg.


Everything, naturally, was delicious. Perhaps the best of all was the bumper raspberry crop out of my MIL's garden.


Merry Christmas to all readers, and may you have a Happy New Year. All the best for 2011!

The Christmas Experimentation Continues

So the earwig post will have to wait for another day, partly because I was side-tracked by cookies, and partly because I have not yet attempted to do anything about the little buggers (and I know you were all just dying to read all about it...)

I was flicking through my Donna Hay magazines, of which I have far too many, looking for cookie recipes when I came across this picture in issue 6.


I thought I'd try something like that to go on top of my cookie trees, so out came the star cutters again. I used two different sizes to make a dough outline from rolled out cookie dough (recipe at end).


I had no idea how hard it would be to find red boiled lollies (I wanted red, dammit, not orange, not yellow, definitely not green and certainly not sugar free!). I ended up buying a mixed pack of fruit lollies, but I'll need another source of just red lollies because I don't eat them and there are hardly any red ones in the packet.

Anyway, you roughly chop up the lollies and pile them in the centre of the stars. Conveniently, it's about one lolly per cookie.


When you cook them in the oven, the lollies melt and spread out and fill the space.


And once they are cool, they're lovely cookie stars with transparent, glass-like coloured centres.


They looked beautiful, and tasted better than I thought they would (not being lolly eater myself). The idea is that you hang them on your tree as decorations, but I don't think the sugar centres would last well if it was humid.
Incidental, I thought I'd try to make a sugar-bark with demerara sugar (as suggested by chef-husband). I found this recipe on the ABC 'The Cook and the Chef' website but if it were used in cookies they would burn before the sugar was melted. Thinking that perhaps another sugar would work I tried again with white and raw casters, and raw sugar, but unfortunately the same thing happens so boiled lollies it must be.

*

'Turtle Dove Cookies'
Paraphrased and adapted from Donna Hay Magazine, Issue 6, page 90.

185g butter
1 cup caster sugar
1 1/2 tsp vanilla extract
2 1/2 cups plain flour
1 egg
130g boiled lollies, roughly chopped

Cream the butter, sugar and vanilla extract until smooth.
Add the flour and egg and mix to form a smooth dough.
Knead the dough lightly.
Wrap in plastic wrap and refrigerate for 30 minutes.
Pre-heat your oven to 180 degrees Celsius (350F).
Roll out the dough on a floured surface, or between sheets of baking paper, until it is 5mm (1/4") thick.
Use a cookie cutter to cut out your cookies. Place them on cookie trays lined with baking paper.
Use a smaller cookie cutter to cut out borders from your larger cookies. Use the leftover dough to make other cookies.
Place 7g of boiled lolly in each cookie border (about one lolly's worth).
Bake for 10 minutes or until golden and the lollies have melted.
Cool on the baking trays.
Makes 18.

More Christmas Cuties.

I've been busy crafting during SP's (rather brief) naps and I finished half a dozen new Christmas girls. I dithered over whether or not to put wings on them - I only have a couple of sets left - but decided I liked them just as they are. It's so nice to actually finish something!

Angels are up!

Finally, some Christmassy bits and pieces are finished and up in my Etsy shop. There are still a few more to come, and I'm all out of good feathers for wings, but I think they're kind of cute. Now, people, shop! http://www.etsy.com/shop/heartsinasia

This one is my favourite...

Busy, busy!

We have done so much in the garden over the last few days. SP has been unwell - her first genuine lurgy - and so she spent a lot of time asleep, which meant that we were able to achieve quite a lot.

I doubled the size of the vegetable garden (and boy, did my body feel it the next day), we extended the irrigation system down to the front of the garden, got my lemon tree planted in the lawn, and the lime trees repotted into bigger pots, not to mention more heritage carrot and tomato seeds planted into pots. And then bok choy and basil seeds, corn and pumpkin seeds, and 'assorted' squash. And then there are the artichoke, capsicum, yellow zucchini, and rhubarb seedlings. And some ancient strawberries, thyme, and miniature roses to be replanted. And I've even started work along the front fence for the lavender hedge (Hidcote). Whew! Out of breath yet?
And do I have pictures of any of it? Nope! SP woke up before I could get organised for that part. Tomorrow's mission is to take photos of all that we've done so far. I do, however, have pictures of my idea for this year's Christmas baking: cookie trees. A rush job, because really I just wanted to try out my new star cutters, but very simple and I think I could work this up into something quite cute.

Home and Away. 24-12-2007

Has it really been more than a year since I last posted? Dylan says 'well that's cause we've been home' but we haven't! I guess our becoming annual SEA-trip earlier this year was such a non-event for us that it didn't warrent posting about? No, it wasn't a non-event, it's just that when you revisit places sometimes some of the charm and wonder is lost from them The long and the short of it is, for this upcoming trip we've chosen to go somewhere we haven't been before: The Philippines.

We're becoming more grown-up backpackers now, no more self-enforced privitations, we've bought super-expensive travel pillows to take away! We also have an exxy head-lamp, a digital SLR each (ahem, yes, insured seperately of course) and multi-vitamins. So grown up are we.

Yes it is the day before christmas, that day of excess, meaning lost in a flurry of spending and eating. I see myself coming full circle with this: From the usual childhood joy at presents and lights and trees; to realising I couldn't be christian and rejecting the idea entirely and then struggling everytime this so-called festive season rolled around (for what was I celebrating, exactly?); to now when I think 'bugger it, just enjoy it anyway'. So we pinched a couple of branches off a radiata pine down by the rail line (and did the environment just a small service by reducing the photosynthetic abilities of just one noxious weed), added lights, red baubles from Target and paper-mache balls from Oxfam and voila! Christmas is in the house, in the corner by the fish tanks, on top of the filing cabinet covered by a shawl from India, next to the Lao woven silk wall hangings, under the temple bells from Thailand and the coloured prayer flags. Hmmm.

So anyway, what's coming up in this life? Well, working Christmas day of course, then off to Mama's for dinner, then madly working, packing and somehow cooking half the food for Dylan's sister's wedding which is on New Year's Eve, celebrating with Dylan's family and friend's all night, expected hangover on New Year's Day then on the 2nd of the new year, off to Melbourne, the first of far too many flights to Angeles, Philippines (alleged home of 10'000 prostitutes, thank you America) for our other life.

'Tis all for now, expect lots of posts about snorkelling to come or Greenie Whining about Coral Bleaching and other assorted environmental destruction ;)

Cheers Big-Ears, and Happy Festive Season for whatever you choose to celebrate :)