Festive Treats

Christmas is Coming! The blogger's getting fat,

So please take some fudge from the foody's stash!
If you don't like fudge there's some jelly too,
And if you don't like jelly, will pâté do?

I know I am not the only one who likes cooking but doesn't have a big family to inflict it on. Even worse, I like making some sweet stuff from time to time and my only resident taster doesn't really have a sweet tooth. So most of the stuff I have been making in a fit of Christmas spirit (mulled wine with extra cherry brandy being my Christmas spirit of choice this year) has been going into work, or my dance class.

I've made a couple of batches of cheat's fudge - white chocolate with orange and cranberry, and dark chocolate with peppermint. The recipe is originally from a Mennonite cookbook but I have taken it and run with it.

Cheat's Fudge

1 can condensed milk (sorry people, you have to use the full-fat version for this, the low-fat one goes soupy)
400g chocolate
50g butter
flavourings, inclusions etc

Melt chocolate and butter in a double boiler. Add condensed milk. Stir until smooth. Add your flavourings and inclusions & spread into a lamington tin lined with non-stick baking paper. Chill and then cut into small pieces.

For my white chocolate one I added the zest of an orange, 100g dried cranberries and garnished it with some edible red glitter. For the dark chocolate I added a bit of peppermint essence and pressed crushed candy canes into the soft fudge, then sprinkled with a little iridescent glitter. Only problem being that the candy canes de-natured and I was left with (very delicious) chocolate fudge swimming in pale pink syrup.

I was also inspired by this recipe from Dan Lepard, for mulled wine plum jellies (scroll past the gorgeous caramels). I love those soft fruit jelly sweets with the crunchy sugar coating, but there are always too many flavours that I don't really care for in a bag, so I was delighted to come across a recipe that promised something similar, if more sophisticated. Now, Paul has been stripping the fruit off his calamondin to prepare it for winter and I have a whole jar of last year's calamondin marmalade left, so I pureed the fruit and used that, along with white wine. Yum. These are so good I am not too keen to share them with anybody! Either as a sweet, or with cheese, these are definitely going to be repeated. And with the useful bit of information that jam gels at 105C, I think my preserving has just turned a corner.


But for Paul, I really did have to make a savoury treat, so I made Hugh Fearnley Whittingstall's Game Terrine. Mine doesn't sit up as proudly as Hugh's because the mallard I thought was in the freezer wasn't, and there weren't as many pigeon breasts as I thought, so my 1kg lean game was more like 500g. Still - it looks very impressive and it tastes absolutely wonderful. Very festive!