Christmas menu recap: Christmas Day desserts

As soon as I saw these Molasses Spice cookies on Andrea's blog, I knew I had to make them. It's a pity she can't remember where she found the recipe, because I would like to give them a round of applause. They are warmly spicy, not too sweet and just gorgeous. A very big hit with Paul. I used black treacle instead of molasses, and had leftover cinnamon sugar from the snickerdoodles so that is what they are rolled in.

They spread out loads, so I was only able to get 8 on a sheet. I made the 8, then put the rest of the cookie dough in a sealed tub in the fridge, for near-instant sweet gratification and fresh-baked cookies over the next week or so.

For our main Christmas dessert, I'd decided on Ecclefechan Tart, which is pretty closely related to a Canadian butter tart. It's a short, crisp pastry case filled with dried fruit and topped with a rich butter, sugar, egg and cream mixture. I used Jamie Oliver's recipe, which doesn't seem to be online, but it adds a dollop of black treacle before the fruit is put in and uses some whisky in the pastry.

Next time I make this (and it was lovely, there will be a next time!) I will mix the treacle into the custard mixture, because trickling it onto the base didn't work very well. I will also omit the whisky from the pastry, because I don't think it added anything to the flavour or texture.

To give my dried fruit a particularly festive note I used dried sour cherries and cranberries, and I flavoured the custard with some fresh, grated ginger and lemon zest. There was supposed to be orange zest as well, and crystallised ginger not fresh, but the oranges were omitted from my grocery delivery and the crystallised ginger I thought I had I apparently didn't. I thought the fresh ginger note was very successful, so I will do that bit again.

To serve with the tart, I made a whisky marmalade ice cream, thinking that the whisky and orange would go particularly well with the whisky and orange in the tart. Since you can't taste the whisky in the pastry and there was no orange zest in the tart my reasoning was flawed, HOWEVER the ice cream was glorious with the tart, so it doesn't matter.

Because of the amount of fat and alcohol in the ice cream, it doesn't need to be churned, so that is nice. It does contain raw egg, so usual cautions apply.

Whisky Marmalade Ice Cream

2 eggs, separated

100g icing sugar

250g mascarpone

3tbs whisky

50g fine shred orange marmalade

150ml double cream

Whisk the egg whites in one large bowl to stiff peaks. In another bowl, whisk the egg yolks and icing sugar until pale and frothy, then beat in the mascarpone, whisky and marmalade. Fold the egg whites into the mascarpone mixture. In the bowl that held the egg whites, beat the cream to soft peaks, then fold gently into the mascarpone mixture. You want it entirely combined, with no streaks of egg white, but without knocking the air out. Scrape the mixture into a freezer-proof lunch box or similar and freeze for 8 hours or so. Remove from the freezer 5 minutes before serving to allow to ripen a bit.

Christmas menu recap: Christmas Day savouries

Here's Day 2 of revisiting our Christmas menu. Desserts tomorrow and then we are done!

We kicked off with Jamie Oliver's potato scones, with smoked salmon and an omelette. I make brilliant omelettes and pretty dire scrambled eggs - don't know why - so the omelette is pretty much my go-to egg preparation.

We didn't need all 4 potato scones, because we wanted to keep brunch quite light, so 2 balls of dough were wrapped in cling film for Boxing Day. We also shared the 3-egg omelette and found that it was just about the perfect amount of food. We had a glass of cava with it, of course.

As a main course, we'd decided on roast beef. I insist on trying to be a thoughtful carnivore, and this 1.6kg wing rib of carefully reared and aged Dexter beef from East London Steak Co was considerably cheaper than a free-range turkey crown. Plus roast beef leftovers are much nicer than turkey leftovers.

We roasted the beef with par-boiled Maris Piper potatoes, chunks of butternut squash, red onions and cloves of garlic.

We ate it, quite rare, with green beans and horseradish gravy. Very simple, but a really glorious way to celebrate a special meal.

Christmas menu recap: Christmas Eve

Well, that's done for another year! I hope everyone got through Christmas with family relationships and bank balances intact!

My next couple of posts are going to be a recap of our Christmas food extravagance, so if you can't bear the sight of any more festive feasting, I suggest you check back next week, when normality will resume. I hope.

Last year, we'd snacked on canapés during the day and then had a big meal in the evening. Which worked well and was very delicious, but this year I decided to spread the feasting over two days. I didn't plan a theme for the food, but it ended up slightly Scottish, featuring mussels, smoked salmon, potato scones and quite a lot of whisky.

So we had the snacky nibbly things on Christmas Eve, then a light brunch followed by a major dinner on Christmas Day.

I may be the last person in the world to discover bacon jam. I mean, I'd heard of it, but always wrote it off as a cracked-out idea from the nation that brought you brunch burgers on Krispy Kremes. Then I started to follow Niamh Shields on twitter and realised that if a perfectly sensible Irish woman thought that bacon jam was a good thing, then it was worth a closer look.

I followed Niamh's recipe for Whisky Bacon Jam, using cheap-but-acceptable Grant's rather than gorgeously peaty but expensive Lagavulin. I'd also run out of chipotle in adobo, so I used a couple of my home-grown, home-smoked hot wax chillis.

This stuff is ambrosial. Anyone who likes strong, salty flavours like tapenade or Gentleman's Relish would like the complex sweet, sharp and earthy flavour of this bacon jam. We gave it a first run for a quick lunch on a sourdough sandwich of leftover roast chicken, with sliced tomatoes and roast garlic mayo. A really fabulous (and lettuceless) variation on a BLT. Definitely a sandwich worth sending to Deb for Souper (soup, salad and sammie) Sunday.

Later that day, I made some quail Scotch Eggs, mostly following James Ramsden's recipe. The only area of variation was that the dozen Clarence Court quail eggs I had ordered were out of stock at the supermarket, so I was given a dozen hard boiled and peeled quail eggs as a substitute . Much more convenient of course, but it did mean the yolks were a bit harder than really desirable.

Scotch Eggs are having a bit of a foody "moment" right now, so there is no shortage of hints and tips out there for making them. The most helpful thing I saw was on Lorraine Pascale's show, where she spread her sausage meat out onto cling film and used that to spread the meat evenly around the egg. It worked very well!

The Scotch Eggs (which have nothing to do with Scotland, so not part of my inadvertant Scottish theme) were joined on the platter by some (Scottish) mini oatcakes, topped with more of the bacon jam and lightly tea-smoked mussels. We drank a good Australian chardonnay and watched Love, Actually. My idea of the ideal Christmas Eve.

Merry Christmas!

With best wishes to all, Merry Christmas from Paul, Urchin and me.

Snickerdoodles and Jam Thumbprints

I do love a bit of festive baking. Not so much as a practitioner as a consumer, though. I deeply admire all the bloggers who post dozens of cookies, cakes and candies throughout December, and talk about holiday cookie trays with ten varieties, and the victory when Granny Vera Myrtle finally passes on *the* recipe. Unfortunately, we don't do a lot of entertaining, so I don't usually have an opportunity for doing my own Christmas baking.

This year, however, my friend Helen is in the UK showing her new babies off to their English grandparents. On Monday she gathered her ex-pat schoolfriends at a pub in Oxford for lunch, so I seized the opportunity to do some baking and palm the results off on other people's thighs.

I made cranberry cream cheese snickerdoodles, using this recipe, and adding 100g dried cranberries to it. I also, for a little festive sparkle, dusted a little red edible glitter on top of the cinnamon sugar topping. Mine didn't spread out as much as the picture, or as much as the last time I made them, maintaining a sort of rock-cake shape. However, they were delicious, like a fruit-filled cinnamon doughnut.

I also made Hugh Fearnley Whittingstall's jam thumbprint biscuits. These got their festive pizazz from the jam I used. I had a jar of cherry & kirsch conserve left over from July's Forging Fromage challenge. I'd found it too sweet to eat as jam, but as a boozy, mincemeaty filling for a cookie it was absolutely ideal. My other variation to the recipe was that as I was 25g short of butter (how does one run out of butter?!) I made up the quantity with cream cheese, left from the snickerdoodles.

I thought both these cookies were extremely successful, but Paul maintains that the jam thumbprints are superior. The little bit of lemon zest in the cookies really complements the mixed peel in the conserve. He thinks they are so successful, in fact, that I might have to make another batch just for us. So you know they are good.

Burgers with Dan Lepard's slider buns

These buns are intriguing. It's a good thing the introduction says "Don't be afraid of the custard powder" because without that I would have been very, very scared of the custard powder! It just sounds so bizarre, to make a pot of Bird's then mix in the flour and salt, but I know by now not to doubt Dan Lepard and these buns really are excellent.

We were just having burgers for dinner at home, so I made large buns, not dainty little slider buns. I also didn't have an egg so I glazed them with milk.

My burger patties were made from an equal quantity of bison mince and 12% fat beef mince, with a little chopped garlic and salt and pepper mixed in. I usually just do salt and pepper, but Paul particularly wanted garlic in them. They certainly don't need anything else added.

I split the buns, piled in some shredded lettuce and topped with a cooked burger, with some mature cheddar melted on, and a good spoonful of chilli relish.

These beautiful burgers are going over to Deb for the next Souper (Soup, Salad and Sandwich) Sunday. They were a delicious sandwich treat!

Chicken & ham pie/ butternut & chickpea pilaf

Paul is, as they say, on a roll with this pastry-making business. Since last month's beef, ale and mushroom pie, he's seldom had his hands out of a bowl of flour. Good for me, bad for my waistline. And speaking of which, did you know the Germans have a word for the fat gained through emotional over-eating? Kummerspeck.

Since at the moment neither of us are working, and we are both a bit unhappy about it, there is quite a lot of emotional over-eating at out house at the moment. This really is a Kummerspeck pie.

It's essentially the Hairy Bikers' Creamy Chicken, Ham & Leek Pie, but with a couple of pretty important variations.

Firstly, we used a whole chicken instead of chicken breasts. A fresh, free-range chicken is about £5/kg. Free-range breast fillets are about £17/kg. Stripping the meat off a whole chicken means you get lovely dark meat as well, for more flavour in the pie. Poaching a whole chicken also gives you loads of extra broth, to make another meal from plus leftover meat for a sandwich. Thrifty is good. So obviously we had to adjust the amount of liquid and the poaching time.

Also, instead of using 250ml of reserved chicken stock and 200ml of milk, we used 450ml of stock. With 150ml of double cream, the sauce really doesn't need extra creaminess! And we used a slightly higher ratio of flour to butter and didn't add the egg to the pastry.

Utterly delicious, but so rich! Definitely an occasional treat, even when comfort-eating.

With the leftover broth, I made a version of Nicky's butternut and chickpea pilaf, topped with halloumi. I used apricots instead of sultanas, and added a couple of chopped preserved lemons at the end. I didn't have the patience to let my halloumi slices take colour the way she did! Very simple, very delicious, and made 2 meals for each of us (as well as getting 6 portions out of the chicken pie). As I said, thrifty is good!