Christmas Baking

Today is Christmas Adam, or Christmas Eve Eve if you're boring. Which for me is a very exciting day as you get all the excitement for christmas without the wrapping/cooking/last minute panic shopping (happens to the best of us) stress of Christmas Eve. And every year we have drinks/dinner/some kind of celebration with our various neighbours (one of whom came up with the genius name of Christmas Adam) and usually watch Love Actually and it's just all very christmassy and lovely :)

Anyway, obviously Christmas is a key time for baking and although I rather disappointingly didn't get round to making a gingerbread house I have done rather a lot of Christmas baking. 

I made gluten free christmas cupcakes for my school bazaar using this recipe and just piped melted white chocolate into shapes, left them to solidify on greaseproof paper and put them on top:

We do secret santa at my school and I got my friend Molly, who is one of those people that is extraordinarily tricky to buy for - especially with a £5 budget. I therefore decided my best option was to make gingerbread men and wrap them in a nice box, and they went down very well :)

I used this recipe and then used mixed icing sugar and water into a reasonably thick paste, divided it into bowls and using liquid food colouring dyed each amount a different colour. I piped it onto my biscuits using a small plastic bag with the corner snipped off, although you could also use a piping bag with a small nozzle.

I was asked to make pudding for my friends christmas dinner, and as no one actually likes christmas pudding I thought a yule log was a pretty good plan. However I've since been told that what I made is actually a roulade, not a yule log as it doesn't have icing or branches so, here's the recipe for my very easy christmas roulade:

Ingredients:

8oz plain chocolate (I used Green and Blacks cooking chocolate)

5 large eggs

6oz caster sugar

whipping/double cream 

Method:

1. Preheat the oven 180C and line a baking tray with greaseproof paper

2. Fill a pan 1/4 full of water and heat. When simmering place broken up chocolate in a bowl over the water, making sure it doesn't touch. When melted remove from the heat and allow to cool.

3. Separate the eggs, with yolks in one bowl and whites in another. Make sure absolutely no yolk goes into the white (I had many failed attempts at this)

4. With a food mixer beat the eggs and all the sugar except one tablespoon (keep this aside for later) until light and creamy. Fold in the chocolate.

5. In a separate bowl, whip the egg whites until they form soft peaks. Add the remaining tbsp of sugar and mix until egg whites peak again.

6. Fold in one tbsp of egg white into the chocolate mixture, when fully incorporated fold in the rest of the whites gently until just mixed. This bit will be very worrying and look like it's all going wrong but I promise it's not, just keep folding!

7. Pour into baking tray and bake for 15 mins. Remove from the oven and leave to cool for a bit in the tin.

8. Now comes the rolling! Lay a tea towel out on a flat surface and sprinkle with white sugar. Turn the almost completely cooled roulade out onto it (once again a stressful moment but just go for it, if it breaks it will just add to the homemade authenticity). Whip the cream and spread all over, use your judgement as to how much you need - as you can see from the pictures I slightly over creamed mine so the rolling didn't go to plan but hey, you can never have too much cream. Then lift the end of the tea towel and roll the roulade lengthways (don't panic if it cracks - just keep rolling),continue tipping the tea towel to roll the roulade onto a plate, decorate if wished and serve!

I actually made a ganache using 100g of plain chocolate and about 120ml cream and spread this on the roulade before the cream just to make it more delicious but this is optional. You could also add thinly sliced black cherries to make a Black Forest Roulade.

As you can see my rolling didn't exactly go swimmingly but it was just
as delicious!

Merry Christmas! 

- Ellie x