tidings of comfort & joy!

This week is extremely busy. The oven seems to be on most of every day, and the cakes and pastries are tumbling out of their pans. All my deliveries will have been made by Friday afternoon and by Friday evening I’m ready to put my feet up and fortify myself for the tasks on Christmas Eve which include decorating our Christmas cake.

It is in these quiet moments, when the house is still and the neighbourhood hushed that my mind skims over the number of Christmas cakes I have eaten (and baked) in my life.

I am particularly fond of baking Christmas cakes because it brings back memories of being up late with my mum in the kitchen decorating our family Christmas cake. The house would be quiet at last (just like the Clement Clarke Moore poem)  and we would  speak to each other in whispers  so as not to wake my younger siblings who could stir at any moment. All the lights would be off except for those in the kitchen which made our activity seem more intimate and  magical.

The same decorations were used on the cake year after year. Mum would pull up a stool to reach the highest cupboard and retrieve the old biscuit tin which held them. There was a little old house with a red roof (who could have lived there?), a green bottle brush tree dusted with white to suggest recent snowfall and a small chalk figurine whose painted features had worn away with time. Royal icing was made with egg whites and sugar, whipped by hand  and then spread over the cake like snow drifts. I would help place the decorations on the cake and make ‘footprints’ in the snow leading to the front door.

That the scale was all wrong between the house, the tree and the small figurine meant nothing to me. I wanted these nights in the kitchen with my mum, warm from the fire and the smell of Christmas cake, to go on forever.

The tree, the house and the figurine are long gone. And so has my mum. But every Christmas Eve, when I’m decorating my cake and the lights are low and the house is quiet, my memories of her and Christmas cake bring me tidings of comfort and joy.

joyful & triumphant!

I love making fruit mince pies at Christmastime. There's something joyful about taking sticky, fragrant dried fruits, macerating them until they are plump and glistening, mixing them with ancient spices, enveloping them in a buttery little case and baking them until they look and smell delicious.

I see history and romance in that innocuous bag of dried mixed fruit on the supermarket shelf but acknowledge that it's hardly likely to have that affect on the majority of shoppers.

Today is perfect for making my mince pies. And unexpected. The temperature is a very reasonable 21. Usually at this time of year I have to crank the air conditioning up so that it's possible to work with the pastry without becoming entangled with it. But today, my little mince pies are behaving nicely and turning out a treat. Triumphant!

christmas is coming!

Today is the first day of summer in Australia and Christmas is just around the corner!

Once we hit December, the whole house moves into a different gear. The charcoal is stocked up for the long, languorous barbeques ahead, the ice-cream maker moves back into the kitchen, the jugs of iced tea start to appear, and christmas baking goes on long into the night.

As I sit out under the stars on these warm nights, listening to the fruit bats in the distance, with the scent of frangipani and gardenias on the breeze, I like to reflect on the year that is drawing to a close and the excitement of Christmas and all that is the very best that it can be.

A new advent calendar is hung, Bing Crosby and Doris Day are dusted off for another year of crooning, and all my favourite Christmas books and movies move to the top of the pile. I make lists of ingredients to gather, presents to find and jobs to do that are the pattern of my life at this time every year, and I love it!

a few of my favourite things

Aprons. Pinafores. I love them. Particularly when they are freshly pressed and starched. 

I wear them all the time at home and would not even think to start baking without a fresh pinny on. Depending on what I’m making, and the day, and my mood, and what I’m wearing – I make my selection. I always wear a proper chef’s black apron when I’m working with dark chocolate as chocolate stains terribly. 

Here I am in my latest acquisition. It’s made from vintage embroidered tablecloths with a crocheted edging in violet. It was handmade by Robin, one of the artisan apron makers I have come to know from my favourite land of Etsy. It’s perfect for the lemon and lavender cake I’m baking which I’ll serve this afternoon on china plates with matching teacups to cheer us all!

white on white

Miss H and Mr A asked me to make them a delicious cake of four tiers of alternating chocolate and caramel for their Byron Bay beach wedding.

After chatting about the  relaxed mood they wanted to create at their wedding and Miss H giving me a sneak preview of her dress, we settled on a cake design that was both romantic and fresh – white on white.

The stylised rose petals are all hand-made from icing and arranged individually on the cake, creating a contemporary take on a traditional rose design.

family wedding

My niece H is to be married shortly and she asked me if I had a photo of my parents (her grandparents) on their wedding day.

Mum and Dad were married in 1950 in St Barnabas Church, Eltham, London. Their marriage came 5 years after the end of the Second World War and 6 years after St Barnabas was badly damaged by enemy bombing over London in 1944.

This was still a time of rationing and friends and relatives donated ration stamps so my parents could get enough eggs, dried fruits and sugar for their wedding cake to be baked. Their cake was finished, as was the tradition, in royal icing incorporating elements of the Lambeth method.

In keeping with the limited availability of materials for wedding cake decorations, their wedding cake topper was fashioned from wax, ribbon and wire, featuring tiny bluebirds on springs under an arch of creamy wax flowers and leaves.

My mother chose a wedding dress design that reflected the Tudor history of nearby Eltham Palace, and the 16th century building where their reception was held. My mother's headdress, which we still have, was also made of cream wax flowers.

I was lucky enough to accompany my parents to St Barnabas and Well Hall one summer to retrace their wedding day, about a decade before they passed away.

My niece will marry 61 years later, on a beautiful beach in Byron Bay, Australia.

remembrance of things past

I'm having a Proust moment and baking petites madeleines.

Marcel Proust made these delicate, plump sponge cakes immortal, 'which look as though they had been moulded in the fluted scallop of a pilgrim's shell', in his classic book A la Recherche du Temps Perdu or Remembrance of Things Past.

And soon, mechanically, weary after a dull day with the prospect of a depressing morrow, I raised to my lips a spoonful of the tea in which I had soaked a morsel of the cake. No sooner had the warm liquid, and crumbs with it, touched my palate, a shudder ran through my whole body, and I stopped, intent upon the extraordinary changes that were taking place. An exquisite pleasure had invaded my senses, but individual, detached, with no suggestion of its origin. And at once the vicissitudes of life have become indifferent to me, its disasters innocuous, its brevity illusory.

I know how he feels.

As you already know, I am a devotee of the sponge, madeleines included. But for me it is the cup of tea which deserves the notoriety arising from Proust's famous reflections that has, instead, been anointed to this little cake. Not that I'm complaining! Tea and cake are a cornerstone of my life. I don't believe there is a finer culinary combination - save a chip butty and tea, or tea and a large shard of milk chocolate. But there you are, tea features again and again.

So on this warm afternoon, with weather you wish you could bottle, the smell of lemon blossom and sweet peas in the garden, I'm taking my madeleines outside to have with tea.

True to Proust's account, I will dip my madeleines in a cup of lime flower tea, but I will also serve them (in a second sitting) with some heady Persian rose petal jam, freshly whipped cream and a stronger infusion of Ceylon tea and milk. As Proust says, 'whence could it have come to me, this all-powerful joy?'