Category Archives: Christmas

Aromatics – experimenting with flavoured bacon cures

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I’ve now made a couple of flavoured bacons, which I’ve then smoked in my DIY cold smoker.

Black pepper bacon – 

  • 770g piece of pork belly
  • Dry cure made up from 65g Supracure, 15g dark brown soft sugar (~10% total weight of the bacon in cure)
  • 3g of cracked black pepper added to the salt & sugar cure mix
  • Cured according to the Bringing Home the Bacon general instructions
  • Smoked for 10 hours using oak dust

This is a lovely eating bacon, and is likely to become one of our house staples.  The pepper adds mostly flavour, very little heat.  The sweet flavour from the sugar is subtle, but present, and adds nice balance.  It cooks well, too.  Highly recommended.  I think it would also be very nice unsmoked.

Christmas cure spicesChristmas bacon – first attempt

  • 530g piece of pork belly
  • 10% cure mix made up of 36g of Supracure and 17g of molasses sugar
  • One bay leaf, 10 allspice berries, 4 juniper berries, and the berry of one clove (the small ball bit on top of the stem), ground in a spice grinder and mixed well with the sugar & salt
  • Cured in the usual way and then cold smoked for 10 hours in a mix of oak and apple smoke

While the cure did smell a bit medicinal, with a dominant smell of clove, despite the tiny quantity of clove added, it did at least smell convincingly of Christmas.  The molasses sugar gives the cured bacon a really distinctive dark colour to the flesh and to the rind.  Smoked over apple and oak wood dust, it has a lovely sweet complex slightly spiced flavour, and is almost exactly what I was looking for in a Christmas bacon.  It is probably more suited to a cooking bacon (and would make awesome ‘pigs in blankets’ for Christmas dinner) but does also eat very well, caramelising beautifully, if my lunch today was anything to go by!

Sugar and spice – Christmas baking, seasons and memories

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Christmas cake ingredientsToday I baked our Christmas cake.  I’m not going to insult your intelligence by claiming it’s my recipe – that credit goes to the great Delia Smith – but it is, in some sense, still a ‘family’ recipe.  It’s the cake my mother makes, and the one I made with my grandmother when I was growing up.  I still make it almost exactly like she did.

The smell of citrus zest, calvados, and freshly grated nutmeg can only mean Christmas isn’t far around the corner. Folding the fruit into the cake mixture, heady scents filling the kitchen, is a mix of excitement about the festive season to come, and remembrance of past Christmases, and those we spent them with.  Every year, when I bake my Christmas cake, I think of Grandma – I remember making this cake with her, in her kitchen, all those years ago.

Cake in tinIn my first year at university, some time in November, I remember going into the big, academic bookshop, and digging out a copy of Delia’s Christmas cookbook.  That year, I made my own cake, and I’ve made one every year since then.

Wrapped and ready for the ovenIt still gets double-wrapped in baking parchment before going into the oven, just like my Grandma taught me.  And even though the fashion these days runs more to smooth white icing, it will still get covered in marzipan and then daubed roughly in a royal icing snow-scene and topped with a marzipan poinsettia, just like my Grandma’s used to.  Though of course I’ll probably only get around to it on Christmas Eve.  Grandma I think would have been better organised!

Cake coolingWe forget too often these days what our food says about us, about where we come from, and the people we’re connected to.  Seasonal foods – big obvious ones like Christmas cakes, as well as more modest ones like the first asparagus of summer – connect us with the turning of the seasons as well as back through our memories to previous years and previous feasts.

I hope you enjoy your festive preparations, and create some new, wonderful memories with people you love!

Deck the Halls – quick & easy Christmas bunting

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Time: an hour or two – Difficulty: low (assuming you can use a sewing machine) – Cost: less than £5

Don’t you love bunting?  Not only is it very pretty, it seems to be bang on trend right now, if the smart interiors boutiques where I can’t afford to shop are anything to go by!

Christmas bunting

A while ago, I (maybe foolishly) volunteered to make a load of bunting to help decorate the village hall for my little sister’s wedding reception.  Before embarking on the epic effort, I thought it might be best to do a mini version to iron the kinks out of my process.  Christmas is coming, so what better than a bit of Christmas bunting for the hallway?

For this project, you will require –

  • A sewing machine (capable of straight stitch – so any sewing machine will do!)
  • Straight scissors and pinking shears
  • Scrap card for a template
  • Bias tape, as much as you want your bunting to be long, and the colour of your choice.  Double fold tape will save you the fold-and-iron process, but may not be as easy to get hold of.
  • Sewing thread to match or contrast with the bias tape.  I find if I’m trying to match a colour and I don’t have a really close match – as in this case, all my greens were too light or too yellow – it’s better to find a neutral colour which matches the tone.  I used a dark grey for this bunting.
  • Some suitably festive fabric.  I used mainly scraps left over from previous Christmas crafting.  If you want to use new fabric a single fat quarter should be enough to make 6m of bunting with quite modest 4″ x 6″ pennants spaced 6″ apart.

Bunting template

Realistically you probably have all of the non-consumables or none of them – 6m of bias tape cost me less than £2, and I had the leftover fabrics already.

This is a single-sided bunting, if you use printed fabrics like I have.  If you use fabrics which have two good sides, of course, you don’t need to worry about that.  I like the effect of the pinking-sheared edges, and it saves an awful lot of time over hemming.

My bunting templateStart by making your template.  I drew mine out for triangular pennants 6″ long and 4″ wide at the top (the whole template is 20″ x 6″).   If you’re using lots of small fabric scraps, you may also make to want a template for a single or a pair of pennants.  Give some thought to what spacing you’re going to want to have between your pennants.  I went for 6″ – the same as the length of the pennant.  Any more than this I think looks a bit sparse, closer and you’ll need more time and fabric to make extra pennants – at the end of the day it’s up to your taste!  Work out how may pennants you’re going to need by applying some basic primary school maths to the problem.   Remember to leave a bit more bias tape at the ends to give you enough to tie the bunting by.

Bunting pennantsUsing your template, mark up your fabric.  I used a biro to mark up the back of the fabric.  You might want to use something a little less crude, if you have it!  Then cut the top of the pennants with the straight scissors, and the sides with the pinking shears.  You’ll notice the lines I’ve cut aren’t quite strictly straight, because my pinking shears aren’t long enough to cut the side in a single action.  I don’t think it matters!

After ironingOnce you’ve cut all your pennants, it’s probably a good time to iron them.  At the same time, if you’ve bought single fold bias tape (bias tape which has the two edges folded in but isn’t yet folded in half) then use the iron to fold this in half and set the fold. Then decide how you want your pennants ordered, if they’re not all the same.

Pinning pennants in placeNow, starting from the centre to ensure they’ll be evenly distributed, start pinning your pennants into the bias tape.  I marked my 6″ gap onto the edge of a piece of card to help me space them consistently – it’s quicker than using a measuring tape or a ruler every time.  Try to be reasonably accurate but don’t stress over it.

Sewing buntingOnce all your pennants are placed, it’s time to sew.  I just used a single row of straight-stitch as close to the open edge of the bias tape as it was practical to do quite quickly.  You could also use a zig-zag stitch, if you prefer.  As you get to each pennant, just make sure the top is placed as far into the fold of the tape as possible, and lying nice and flat, before you sew it in place.

Bunting, folded for storageChristmas bunting - completedThat’s it, keep sewing until you’ve reached the end of your tape and all the pennants are secured in place.

Doesn’t it look pretty?  I can’t wait for Christmas now!

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Christmas is coming, the gin is getting pink!

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Time: 1hr — Patience: 2 – 3 months — Difficulty: Low — Knackyness: Low

Sloe Gin maturing in demijohn

Sloe gin is a traditional country Christmastime treat, and is a liqueur made by flavouring gin with sloes (the fruit of the blackthorn bush) and sugar.  The traditional time to pick sloes is just after the first frost (so right now, for most of the UK!) as this both damages the cell walls of the sloes and changes their flavour, sweetening them.  You can make sloe gin very successfully with sloes picked before the first frost, but it’s wise to freeze them at least overnight before proceeding.

BE AWARE – Blackthorn isn’t called blackthorn for nothing!  The bushes are armed with vicious spikes, so proceed carefully and consider wearing gloves to pick with.  Personally I don’t, but as a result I give a blood sacrifice for my sloes every year.

This gin is very simple, and is sweetened to my taste.  You might find your palate runs to more or less sugar.  I’ve also seen gin recipes with spice additions such as a cinnamon stick, vanilla pods, and so on – so go ahead and experiment!

You will require –

  • A 1.5l bottle of cheap gin
  • 750g of sugar.  I like to use golden caster sugar, but you could experiment with other sugars
  • About a pint to a pint and a half of sloes, washed, dried (and frozen overnight if required)
  • An empty 1l glass screw-top bottle.
  • Kitchen scales, a measuring jug and, if available, a funnel.

Transfer 600ml of the gin from the 1.5l bottle to the clean 1l bottle, leaving 900ml behind.

Using the dry funnel, add 300g of sugar to the small bottle and 450g to the large one.

Fill up the remaining space in the bottles with the sloes.  Put any extras back in the freezer.

That’s it, really!

Give the bottles a good shake several times a day until all the sugar dissolves.  By this time it should have a similar appearance to the photo above, with colour starting to come into the gin.  Then put it in a cool dark place and forget about it for at least two months.

After that, strain the gin from the sloes and store in clean bottles.  In the past I’ve bought some pretty-looking 250ml bottles and used these for Christmas presents, which seem to be popular!  Add a couple of the excess sloes you put in the deep freeze to each bottle for that extra decorative touch.