The Christmas Kitchen pt 1

Because I like cooking (and eating) and think there are plenty of good recipes around at this time of year that I’m happy for the kids to be involved with (unlike, say, a roast; made up mostly of raw meat, knives, and boiling oil) I find it’s a great time to get them away from their ‘books’ and 'toys’ and into the kitchen to make my friends some gifts. 

Two favourites for this time of year, both pretty foolproof and delicious, are Dan Lepard’s Stollen Bars, and these Dutch biscuits (hunted down because I wanted something I could stick mixed peel in). 

A few points:

1. I didn’t have any ground cardamom - I have the pods, but we’ve lost the mortar and pestle (or given it to the charity shop in one of our frenzied clearouts). So for both recipes I did without, although I’m a bit sorry with the Stollen bars. It really adds something there. 

2. I’d add a tiny dash more glycerine to the Stollen bars - might try with 2tsp? Maybe not. But the serving suggestions are BONKERS: for this to serve 6 to 8, you’d be looking at portions the size of sandwiches. I cut them into double-bite size (still huge) which gives around 25 portions. Much better. 

3. Particularly with the biscuits, I tend to lob in whatever spices I have in my cupboard. If I’m short on ground cardamom and ground cloves, I’ll just smell around and go for cinnamon, ginger, allspice, mixed spice and/or nutmeg. Yom. 

As I say, these are really easy recipes, both for nervous bakers and for children to do too. It’s in no way compulsory to weigh out the ingredients for the more complicated of these recipes (the Stollen bars) but it does help to quell any pathetic urges to pretend to be doing a cookery programme on TV. 

Anyway, go, cook. Enjoy. 

Jesus, if I had pins like Cyd Charisse, I’d wear this just to go to the shops for eggs and batteries. As it is, still good (albeit with, say, a bottom half) for a bride. The whole of Singin’ in the Rain is filled with unbelievably pleasing costumes, but this one, one of three wedding outfits in the film, takes the Walter-Plunkett-flavour biscuit. And it’s probably, in its strange ‘ballet within a dream within an imagined musical number within a film’ way, one of my favourite weddings on film. What’s yours?

Walking down the ginnel from the Tube the other day, I noticed tonnes of fat brambles through the fence. In the scrub at the edge of our estate (council, not family, obviously) there are huge bramble bushes that I forget entirely for the other 11 months of the year, all in that perfect state of berriness ranging from hard and green to fat and purple-black, guaranteeing weeks’ worth of good cropping.

If I was getting hitched any time soon, I would definitely want some bramble-flavoured things at my feast - not only are they completely delicious, they are also free£££££££££eeee. And if you’re worried about getting bramble juice on you, what are you going to serve? White wine and veal?  

So here are my three favourite bramble recipes:

BRAMBLE PAVLOVA

egg whites
caster sugar
300ml double cream
two big handfuls of brambles
three or four tablespoons of lemon curd

Delia’s recipe’s great for meringue, just follow that; I used three medium egg whites for a pavlova that would easily have served between six and eight, to give you some idea of numbers, so you can just work out from how much of everything you need. Once the pavlova is cooked and cooled, layer on some lightly whipped cream (so it still slops off the spoon, not beaten so hard it’s getting butter fat globules in and you have to slice it off), drizzle some lemon curd all over it all, pile on some brambles and scatter with chopped hazelnuts.

Give me a day or two, and I’ll give you my lemon curd recipe too. 

BRAMBLE COCKTAIL

gin
chambord
sugar syrup
squeeze of lemon
couple of brambles

Those are the official ingredients, which I’m sure you’re capable of tossing together yourself to taste, but if you’re catering for loads of folk, chambord and lemonade with some brambles and sprigs of fresh mint are just the ticket. 

BRAMBLE AND PEAR COBBLER

butter
self-raising flour
sugar
nutmeg
cornflour
plain yoghurt
pears
lemon rind
brambles

I was going to make this a crumble (180g plain flour, 75g cold, cold butter, 70g caster sugar and a handful of chopped hazelnuts - blitz in a food processor or sift and rub until a crumble forms. Also great to just keep in the freezer for EMERGENCY DESSERTS no I don’t know what that means either) but I make them so often that I thought I’d try something else. I was also curious about cobbler as the American fiction I read as a teen always used “peach cobbler” as a geographic placing device for a Southern beauty who felt way out of her depth in New York/her liberal college/somewhere they didn’t serve peach cobbler.  

Cobbler, it turns out, is even easier than crumble. Or just as easy. Whatever, it’s not hard work. To adapt this Delicious recipe, I put some chopped stem ginger in syrup plus a little bit of grated lemon zest with the pear and brambles, and some nutmeg instead of cinnamon in the dough. Serve that sucker with cold, cold cream, custard or vanilla ice cream. Which I shall also give you a recipe for when I get round to it. 

Last summer, a group of kids helped me pick tonnes of brambles so I gave them each a jar of the jam as a thank you. I pictured a musical montage of the coming years, as I mentored local youths through my forraging feasts. SPOILER: Didn’t happen. 

For the 'Ladies'

If I had to give one tip for any bride, it would be: go to Rigby & Peller and get yourself fitted properly for whatever bra you need on your wedding day. That would be my top tip, simply because it’s my top tip for anyone in possession of breasts whatever their marital status. FACT. 

And despite the fact that R&P is slightly pricier than, say, M&S, I’m not of a size these days where I can just throw on any old slip of fabric and be able to function for the day. (I found one of my old bras from my late teens the other day, that I’d previously been unable to throw away because it was so beautiful. We had a moment together, holding one another while I wept, then I chucked it, safe in the knowledge it will never again serve me as it once did). R&P bras are beautiful and extremely good quality (although the staff there wince when I tell them, I have been wearing my last batch for four years, just banging them through the washing machine like some kind of rule-breaking lingerie philistine). 

I’ve been measured plenty of places before, convinced of a good bra for me and sent away with a bag of things that ached and pained me and were never worn again. But R&P measure you WITH THEIR EYES (that sounds awful, but it is completely magic, if you can stomach standing in front of a stranger only in your pants at 10am as I did this morning) then actually try the bras on you themselves, shoving and shaping you so you’re wearing the damn thing properly (favourite moment today: when the woman helping me get into a bra said, ‘Oops! I think we’re sitting on a lady!’. I think I just stared at her with my mouth open. She didn’t look the type to enjoy a high-five). 

So whether you’re going with the strapless option for your wedding dress and looking for a basque, sporting an asymmetric dress and need matching support, or you just wear a bra ever, in summary: VISIT RIGBY AND PELLER IF YOU POSSIBLY CAN. Thanks.