Skip to main content

Christmas cakes


I finally got around to icing the Christmas cakes, but I think the mince pies will have to be a new year's event instead.  Well, and why not?  Following the tradition of recent years, I baked a large square cake from Nigella's recipe in How to Be a Domestic Goddess, cut it in half and iced each part separately.  This has the dual advantages of providing more icing and making the cake keep better.  Not that it ever seems to keep that long.

Long thin cakes lend themselves to long thin decorations, do they not?


Or else to digging out that old standby, the Christmas cookie cutters.  Every year I think I might do something really fancy, and then I run out of time and think, well, the important thing is that it tastes good!

Merry Christmas!

Comments

Popular posts from this blog

A Place at the Table: Spiritual Formation Book 12

"God has ordained in his great wisdom and goodness that eating, and especially eating in company, should be one of the most profound and pleasurable aspects of being human." Miranda Harris had been intending to write a book for years. She'd got as far as a folder full of notes when she died suddenly in a car accident in 2019. When her daughter, Jo Swinney, found the notes, she decided to bring her mum's dream to fruition. A Place at the Table was the result. I thought this was going to be a nice friendly book about having people over for dinner. In one sense it is, but it's pretty hard-hitting as well. Miranda and her husband Peter co-founded the environmental charity A Rocha, so the book doesn't shy away from considering the environmental aspects of what we eat and how we live. They also travelled widely and encountered hunger at close quarters; the tension between seeing such poverty and believing in a generous God comes out clearly in A Place at the Table.

Flexitarianism

Hey folks!  I learnt a new word today!  I can now proudly proclaim myself to be a flexitarian .  Yes, I wish that meant I'm in training to be a trapeze artist.  Or that I'm a leading world expert on the chemical properties of stretchy materials.  All it actually means is that I don't eat meat that much. Well, big deal.  That lumps me in with a majority of the world's population, many of whom have no choice about the matter.  So why the need for a fancy new word?  Because, it seems, that we in the prosperous West have come to regard having bacon for breakfast, chicken sandwiches for lunch and a steak for dinner as entirely normal.  But also because we in the prosperous West are starting to realise that might not be an entirely good idea. You know about factory farming, of course.  The images of chickens crammed into tiny cages and pigs which never see the sunlight, which we push out of our minds when we reach for our plastic-wrapped package of sausages in t

Thirsting

When the poor and needy seek water,      and there is none,      and their tongue is parched with thirst, I the Lord will answer them;      I the God of Israel will not forsake them.   I will open rivers on the bare heights,      and fountains in the midst of the valleys. I will make the wilderness a pool of water,      and the dry land springs of water. Isaiah 41:17-18