Holiday Baking

I haven't done a lick of writing since the beginning of December, being consumed by the usual holiday busy-ness plus an ambitious succession of crafts and baking projects.  

At the beginning of the month, I used the leftover fabric from my baby-carrier making to make bags for my mother, mother-in-law, and sister-in-law, plus a few small ones to wrap cookies in because the only tins I could find cost about 8 euro a pop.  

For Mike's relatives over in Ireland I made the following: Aunt Big's Gingersnaps, an old stand-by of mine, and two recipes that were new to me, Rugelach and Chocolate Candy Cane Cookies.  The rugelach I will definitely make again, despite the fact that it was a two-day process with a bit of fiddling.  The candy cane cookies were very yummy, but it is next to impossible to find striped peppermint candies in Ireland, even three weeks before Christmas, and I found the peppermint filling a bit much. The chocolate cookie part, however, was delicious.

Then I decided it was time to try my hand at a proper yeast bread, and I made Oatmeal Wheat Bread, which was pretty good except that I accidentally left the salt out and had to add it later in the process, so it wasn't quite right. Also, I made it the day before our departure to the US, so we hardly even had a chance to eat it. I hope out flatmate had some and it didn't all go to waste. 

On arrival in the US on Saturday evening, I had a bad cold, but it was only a day or two before I found myself back in the swing of compulsive baking.  We made pizza on Sunday night and I accidentally made two batches of pizza dough. My parents were out to one of their never-ending rounds of dinner parties, so we got to have a night with just the "young people" (of which I am by far the oldest). My cousin Jethro and his girlfriend Cleo came over from next door and helped assemble the pizza, and we enjoyed some of their cider.  A few days later I used the second batch of dough to make a test run of sticky buns, drawing on various recipes. 

It wasn't exactly baking, but I also made a batch of these Beet and Carrot Pancakes one night, which were delicious.  I will definitely make them again when we're back in Ireland, as they include no hard-to-find ingredients.  I celebrated having a cast-iron skillet at my disposal by making a German Pancake one morning (no good recipe to link to, sadly.  It's basically eggs, milk, and flour with a little butter whisked in, then baked in a hot oven for 15-20 minutes, rather than fried on the stove).  Yesterday, I went into town with my mother and bought a cast-iron skillet to take back to Ireland so I can make this over there.

The biggest project of all was the Gingerbread House.  It was a lot of work, probably 8-10 hours altogether, not including shopping trips, spread out over several days.  Making the dough was straightforward enough, but after that it got interesting. I browsed the internet for templates, but in the end I spent a morning making my own, doing sketches on graph paper, trying to figure out how to fit the houses onto my 6 pieces of gingerbread, making models out of cardboard, and finally using those cardboard models as templates.

Rolling out the gingerbread dough was tricky -- I don't think I got it to quite the right thickness -- but it worked well enough in the end.  It was also difficult to transfer the pieces onto the cookie sheets without having them stretch all out of square.  They came out of the oven with edges slightly rounded, so I needed to trim them again before assembly.  

Assembly was another challenge. I took the advice from other users on epicurious.com and used caramelized sugar, rather than royal icing, to stick the pieces together.  This worked well, but my fingers suffered. I got a big burn on the pad of my right middle finger, which took a solid week to heal up, and a lesser burn on the pointer finger of that hand.  It was worth it though, really.  

I had envisioned decoration as a group effort, but Nova is still a bit small for so much playing with sugar, and everyone else was busy. My mother and Mike stuck on a few pieces, but mostly it was up to me, wrestling with an obscene amount of royal icing, which is basically a plaster made of egg whites and powdered/icing sugar.  The peeps snowmen were my favorite props.  Here are the results, two houses (the second picture is actually of the bigger of the two houses):

Last night, we had a demolition party. My cousin Ben's daughters, aged 2, 4, and 7, were here, and led the way.  The gingerbread still tasted good, even after being in house form for a week, and went well with red wine.  

Since making the gingerbread house, I managed a few smaller projects.  Christmas is just not complete without cut-out sugar cookies. My mother didn't come up with her standard recipe quickly enough, only said that it was "sort of a shortbread," so I turned to the computer again.  I wanted to do Christmas Cutouts with Vanilla Icing, but my mother thought that the Holiday Sugar Cookies sounded better.  I made the sugar cookies first, but since I'd softened a whole pound of butter I thought I should use it, so I made up a batch of the Christmas Cutout dough, too.  

The packs of dough languished in the refrigerator while Mike, Nova and I went off to Cambridge overnight, where we managed to fit in two separate trips to Toscanini's.  I let Nova try some, because it's so much better than any ice cream she's likely to meet elsewhere.

We got back home around 6 on Christmas Eve, and I put together the dough for Rich Rum Sticky Buns.  I would have done the maple syrup topping from another recipe instead, but I was too tired and scatter-brained to do anything involving combining different sets of instructions.  We had the sticky buns and a frittata for breakfast on Christmas morning. I can't even remember what I put in the fritatta -- I think it was eggs, red and green bell peppers, potatoes, garlic and herb chevre, and maybe a couple of other things, with some slightly tired shredded parmesan on the top.  

We rolled out, cut and baked the sugar cookies on Christmas afternoon, and I made the vanilla icing from the recipe I'd picked out.  Decorating the cookies was a rushed and haphazard job, but that didn't seem to slow down their consumption, any.  The Christmas Cutouts with Vanilla Icing were the clear favorite, nice and moist because of the touch of sour cream, but the other ones were good, too.  

It is only as I write it all down that I realize quite how much baking I have done in the past two and a half weeks, but it's been fun to use a fully equipped kitchen for a change. My mother has all the gadgets -- a full array of baking sheets, a kitchenaid, a cuisinart, and an almost infinite array of small kitchen tools.  

Also, I have here a well-stocked pantry and an audience that appreciates a little liquor in its cooking, so the other night I topped it off by finally making the topping that was meant to go with Nova's Birthday cake, from this recipe.  I made a half-batch of Lemon Chiffon Cake, because it was easier than halving the Orange Chiffon Cake recipe and I didn't have any oranges on hand when I started cooking (although they turned up in time for the topping).  

I am looking forward to having a bit of a rest when we get back to Ireland!