Nigella Christmas: Food, Family, Friends, Festivities (28 page)

90g soft butter

100g caster sugar

1 large egg

1 teaspoon ground ginger (or vanilla extract)

200g plain flour, plus more for sprinkling

½ teaspoon baking powder

½ teaspoon fine salt

edible gold dust or glitter flakes (see

Stockists

)

• Preheat the oven to 180°C/gas mark 4 and line a baking sheet or two with baking parchment or Bake-O-Glide.

• Cream the butter and sugar together until whipped soft and pale, then beat in the egg, followed by the ginger (or vanilla), flour, baking powder and salt and continue mixing until it all comes together to make a soft dough.

• Form into 2 discs, wrap each one in clingfilm and let it rest in the fridge for 20–30 minutes.

• Sprinkle a suitable surface with flour, place a disc of dough on it and sprinkle a little more flour on top. Then roll it out to a thickness of about 5mm.

• Cut into shapes, dipping the cutter into flour as you go, and place the biscuits a little apart on the lined baking sheet/s. Keep the scraps of the first disc, to mix with the scraps of the second and roll and cut, re-roll and cut, until you’ve used up the mixture. This is a wonderfully pliable dough, which makes it an unstressful joy to work with.

• Bake in the oven for 8–12 minutes: this depends on their shape, how many sheets are in the oven at the same time, and whether on the upper or lower shelf, though you can swap them around after about 5 minutes. When they’re ready, expect them to be tinged a pronounced pale gold around the edges; they’ll be softish still in the middle, but will harden on cooling.

• Take the sheets out of the oven, remove the cookies, with a flat, preferably flexible, spatula to a wire rack and leave to cool.

• Using a small (unused) paintbrush or eyeshadow brush, dip in the edible gold dust – I use Pearl – or glitter flakes, and give each cookie its gilded coating.

MAKE AHEAD TIP:

Bake the cookies up to 5 days ahead. Cool and store in an airtight container between sheets of parchment paper.

FREEZE AHEAD TIP:

Bake and then freeze the cooled cookies in sealable bags or rigid containers for up to 3 months. Thaw at room temperature.

CHRISTMAS MORNING MUFFINS

I have never quite understood how people can go in for vast, rich breakfasts on Christmas morning. I am hardly a modest eater by anyone’s standards, but even I can’t quite accommodate a platterful of buttery scrambled eggs with smoked salmon before the gargantuan Christmas feast. And I speak as cook and eater on this one.

I do, however, see the need to make breakfast special in some way, and these muffins do that. What’s more, if you measure out the dry ingredients the night before and put the muffin cases in the muffin tin, you don’t need to do anything more labour intensive on Christmas morning itself than preheat your oven, whisk up a few runny ingredients in a jug and stir them into the waiting bowl. Then dollop the batter into the prepared muffin cases and all’s sweet – and smelling of cinnamony, orange-scented Christmas.

A last, heartfelt, note: Christmas, as I’ve said often, is about ritual and tradition; we inherit some, we invent others. But even those we invent are not sacrosanct. These muffins were my way, years back, of establishing a Christmas routine as a grown-up, and I have no desire to change things – essentially – now. But I’ve improved the recipe, and give you its new, evolved form here. In the kitchen, as in life, it is possible to play with tradition, without turning away from the past.

Makes 12

250g plain flour

2½ teaspoons baking powder

½ teaspoon bicarbonate of soda

100g caster sugar

1 teaspoon ground cinnamon

good grating of fresh nutmeg (or ¼ teaspoon ground nutmeg)

2 clementines/satsumas

approx. 125ml full-fat milk

75ml vegetable oil (or melted butter left to cool slightly)

1 egg

175g dried cranberries

FOR THE TOPPING:

3 teaspoons demerara sugar

• Preheat the oven to 200°C/gas mark 6. Line a 12-bun muffin tin with muffin papers or (as I have here) silicone inserts.

• Measure the flour, baking powder, bicarbonate of soda, caster sugar, cinnamon and nutmeg into a large bowl; grate the zest of the clementine/satsuma over, and combine. If you are doing this in advance, leave the zesting till Christmas morning.

• Squeeze the juice of the clementines/satsumas into a measuring jug, and pour in the milk until it comes up to the 200ml mark.

• Add the oil (or slightly cooled, melted butter) and egg, and lightly beat until just combined.

• Pour this liquid mixture into the bowl of dried ingredients and stir until everything is more or less combined, remembering that a well-beaten mixture makes for heavy muffins: in other words a lumpy batter is a good thing here.

• Fold in the cranberries, then spoon the batter into the muffin cases and sprinkle the demerara sugar on top.

• Bake in the oven for 20 minutes, by which time the air should be thick with the promise of good things and the good things themselves golden brown and ready to be eaten, either plain or broken up and smeared, as you go, with unsalted butter and marmalade.

MAKE AHEAD TIP:

Bake the muffins up to 3 days ahead. Cool and pack in an airtight container between layers of parchment paper. Pop into a warm oven for 5 minutes just before serving.

FREEZE AHEAD TIP:

Make and then freeze the muffins in a rigid container for up to 3 months. Thaw at room temperature. Pop into a warm oven for 5 minutes just before serving.

CHRISTMAS CUPCAKES

These are what I make – biggest batch to date 96 in one morning – when required to provide something for the cake stall at the school Christmas Fair. I double the recipe, put 2 trays of cupcakes in the oven at a time and then blitz on and on (4 double batches all told) until my whole kitchen table is covered. When they’re cool, I ice and decorate – all white, but some scattered with sprinkles, some with holly and berries made from bought fondant icing, some with sugar poinsettia (expensive but enchanting) and other seasonal delights – and a more beautiful sight is hard to imagine.

But a simple, single batch of 12 is all you need under normal Christmassy conditions. The thing about sponge is that it is best the day it’s made, although if covered thickly and completely with the royal icing, you might buy yourself an extra day.

Makes 12

FOR THE CUPCAKES:

125g soft butter

125g sugar

2 eggs

125g flour

½ teaspoon bicarbonate of soda

2 teaspoons baking powder

2 teaspoons vanilla extract

2–3 × 15ml tablespoons full-fat milk

FOR DECORATION (see Stockists):

½ × 500g packet instant royal icing

Christmassy sprinkles

red and green readymade roll-out icing or sugarpaste (optional)

seasonal sugar decorations (optional)

• Take everything you need out of the fridge in time to come to room temperature – this makes a huge difference to the lightness of the cupcakes later – and preheat the oven to 200°C/gas mark 6. Fill a muffin tin with paper cases.

• Put all the ingredients for the cupcakes except the milk into a food processor and blitz until smooth.

• Pulse while adding the milk down the funnel – try one tablespoonful at a time – to make a smooth dropping consistency.

• Divide the mixture in your prepared muffin tin, and bake in the oven for 15–20 minutes. They should have risen and be golden on top.

• Let them cool a little in their tins on a rack, and then carefully take them out of the tin to cool in their papers, still on the wire rack.

• To ice, make up the royal icing as directed on the packet and, using a tablespoon, dollop over the cupcakes, so that each one is thickly covered.

• Adorn with sprinkles (don’t let the icing dry before scattering) or sugar decorations, or roll out the fondant icing or sugarpaste and cut out Christmassy shapes of your choice to go on top.

MAKE AHEAD TIP:

Make the cupcakes the day before and store in an airtight container.

FREEZE AHEAD TIP:

Make and freeze the cupcakes for up to 3 months. Thaw on a wire rack. Use on the same day.

ALL WRAPPED UP

Edible Presents and Party Preserves

I AM AWARE THAT it sounds almost affectedly homespun to advocate the return of handmade presents, but my fervour here makes me indifferent to any accusation of winsomely retro fancy. There is a wonderful German adjective, rechthaberisch – to denote someone who always thinks they’re right – that describes me, at least on this issue, with delicious Teutonic accuracy. I am beyond doubt; no contemporarily faddish self-questioning or equivocation can diminish my zeal. I know I’m right. It’s not that I feel such an overwhelming drive to be stirring pots, and clipping lids and getting labels ready – though I do – but that the other choices, the Christmas-present game as it is currently played out, seems vulgar, grotesque, idiotic by comparison.

Of course, this is not essentially new: people have been tut-tutting about the crass commercialization of Christmas ever since I was a child and, I’m willing to believe, long before that. I don’t doubt it has been getting steadily worse, but then, after a certain age it seems that most things do. And perhaps at this time of year, nostalgia bites in a little too sharply. Christmas can’t ever match up to our childhood memories of it. Even now – and I am a person without a sentimental bone in her body – I can remember the ecstatic excitement of waking up in the early hours of dawn with the leg-deadening weight of my Christmas stocking at the end of my bed. And it’s also true that if I filled my children’s stockings with what my childhood stockings were stuffed with – a book or two, several tangerines, a pomegranate and a lucky dip sweetie bag, hair clips and transfers – they would probably not take it in good part. But still, I am too committed a consumer to feel able to complain about rampant commercialism with a clear conscience or good heart.

Nevertheless, even for me, there comes a moment, a long, protracted, sanity-busting moment, when it all seems just too much. And it is too much: too much money, too much shopping, too much wrapping, too much to worry about, and just too out of control. Wrapping paper costs more than presents used to. And there are so many presents to get. I don’t say that because I’m mean or because I have anything against the exchange of gifts. Actually, giving presents is one of the few pure pleasures in life. I relish and savour it, and delight in getting it right. But that requires thought, honest selection and time for a proper unpanicked, focused search. Can you tell me that any of this is possible at Christmas? No, I didn’t think so. It’s too easy to feel the mania and the raging impatience come over you in the bustle of the shops, and then you end up with presents that cost too much and aren’t even right. According to my history teacher at school, Churchill once apologized for the length of a memorandum, saying that if he’d had more time, he’d have made it shorter. Present buying is a bit like that: it takes time to find the right thing, and when you don’t have that, you just spend more to lesser effect.

I can’t help feeling, too, that it made a little more sense when you gave presents only to people you knew well. But the proliferation of presents can seem like the Arms Race, doomed to be self-perpetuating, and cripplingly expensive.

I’d like to feel that what I’m giving meant something. This chapter carries, in more senses than one, the essential message of this book, because for me Christmas is created and celebrated in the kitchen. You don’t have to take the slightly emetic food-is-love line to know that giving a present of something you’ve made with your own hands, in your own time, is what Christmas is or should be about.

Not that the time required of you is excessive. Far from it: none of the recipes is complicated or takes very long; another of the joys of the edible present approach is that it’s less stressful; you can buy ingredients in the normal course of your grocery shopping; and a pretty jar, a handwritten label and maybe a rosette or a ribbon are all you need in the way of wrapping (see Stockists). Don’t forget, though, to write any storage instructions on the label, and a note of how long your present will keep for.

You don’t even have to cook: spiced salt, vanilla sugar, flavoured vodka or vinegar are among the options for those who want to start in the shallow end. But as I’ve said, all the recipes I suggest below are simple. If you don’t want to buy jars and bottles, if your drive to make presents is part of a general relish for virtuous recycling, then know that the jars and bottles you no doubt have in your kitchen already will do just as well. If, however, you want to buy containers expressively for this project, again turn to Stockists.

Although the recipes that follow are intended to form a shortlist of easy, pleasing presents, there are two caveats here. The first is that I don’t advise giving away all of them: a store of chutneys and a relish or two are pantry preserves you should keep on hand yourself, even if you don’t have a pantry. Cold cuts and suppers made from leftovers soar to gastro-greatness with judicious addition of something tangy out of a jar. Indeed, there are some who hold that Christmas is nothing without its condiments; I suspect they’re right.

Second, please don’t be confined by this chapter. Throughout the book are recipes that can be packaged up as presents without even any amendment. The Chocolate Peanut-Butter Cups and Christmas Rocky Road from The More the Merrier can be popped into boxes, or slipped into cellophane bags, and tied with ribbon. If it’s before Christmas, give friends a jar of Redder Than Red Cranberry Sauce, knowing that you’re contributing towards their feast day celebrations. Consider, too, the Sticky Maple Pecans (without the attendant pancakes) and the Cranberry, Almond and Honey Granola from A Christmas Brunch.

And while a Christmas cake makes a generous present, there’s nothing wrong with making a few presents out of each batch of baking. Certainly, unless it’s for a whole family, then a smaller, individually sized cake, can be perfect. You can get four 10cm cakes out of the quantities specified for the smallest diameter of the Traditional Christmas Cake, and they will need 40–50 minutes in a 150°C/gas mark 2 oven.