Snowflakes in the oven.

I know, it's not even December yet, however, today is "Stir up Sunday" - the day when it is traditional to make your Christmas pudding. I'm not making a pudding, because I'm not cooking Christmas dinner this year, but I did decide to make a cake.  I happened to have just the right amount of marzipan and sugar paste icing left over from the wedding cake - see my two "Tiers of Happiness" posts - and the recipe I used for the wedding cake was actually a slightly tweaked Christmas cake recipe so I think that was some kind of omen. I soaked the fruit in brandy and orange juice for a week and made the cake today.  I will be feeding it with brandy over the coming weeks and then sharing it with my family. Look out for photos of the finished cake in a later post. I'm planning on decorating it using my new snowflake cutters, of which more later.

My daughter has got me in the mood for Christmas early this year, and despite not cooking the actual Christmas dinner as I usually do, I seem to have a pile of foodie magazines tempting me into making all kinds of things, including a chocolate pavlova with salted caramel sauce, and a mulled berry snowflake tart, which most gratifyingly looked even better in reality than in the magazine. I bought the aforementioned snowflake cutters especially on eBay for £2.59 (free postage) which were a triumph!

I didn't make the pastry, though I could have if I'd have wanted to.  I lined my favourite loose bottomed tart tin with the pastry and blind baked it for 15 mins. The rest of the pastry was transformed into snowflakes of three different sizes and these were put on a separate tray and sprinkled with caster sugar. The filling was a mixture of fresh cranberries, frozen mixed berries (including blackberries, blackcurrants and cherries), apple juice, port, sugar, spices including nutmeg and cinnamon, plus cornflour which were cooked in a pan first before adding to the pastry cake and baking for 35 minutes.  For the last 15 minutes of cooking time, the pastry snowflakes were added to the oven.  When time was up, they were positioned on top of the tart, preventing the juice from bleeding into them and hence making for a more glamourous finish.  I added a dusting of icing sugar (a tweak from the printed recipe as agreed by my culinary aesthetic advisor - he knows who he is) and served with a dollop of extra thick cream. The cranberries gave it a fresh taste that wasn't too overly sweet.

I'm going to try a new recipe for mulled wine soon, including lemongrass and stem ginger.  The cold winter evenings suddenly don't seem so bad after all. There will be plenty of new recipes going on over the festive season so watch this space.  It's going to be a good one!

Thank you for reading,

Caroline.