briarwood: (Hogfather Death)
Morgan Briarwood ([personal profile] briarwood) wrote2012-12-26 01:13 pm

My Christmas baking

This year I was determined to do some proper baking for Christmas. I made my own mincemeat and Christmas pud. The mincemeat made lovely mince pies.

My most Christmassy bake was a gingerbread house which I made for a friend:
Gingerbread House
Gingerbread and mint is one of those flavour combos you don't expect to work, but it kinda does. So the snow is made from crushed mint imperials. The roof tiles are After Eight mints and the beams are mint Matchmakers. Liquorice Allsorts as the main roof beam and door frame. The windows are painted silver with edible paint.

As my own family have an irrational prejudice against traditional Christmas bakes, I made this
White Chocolate Cheesecake
white chocolate cheesecake for our festive desert. The decoration is pomegranate seeds and I made a coulis from raspberry and pomegranate seeds to go with it. Lovely!

Our family tradition for Boxing Day lunch is a buffet: cold cuts of leftover turkey, ham and beef, plus chips and whatever else we've got that can be thrown together without too much effort. I made fresh bread as my contribution.
White Tin Loaf
The tin loaf is white bread made with sour cream to Dan Lepard's recipe, slightly altered. It's the best one I've found and makes beautifully soft white bread. This bread makes the best toast I've ever tasted!

Seed Bread Plait
I adapted the same recipe for this one, but used malted seed flour instead of white. The dough was harder to work, but it rose so nicely I decided to try something fancy. The plait is made using Paul Hollywood's directions from The Great British Bake-off. Not perfect, but it looks pretty good!