Lebkuchen plate

Lebkuchen

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Christmas is one of the times of the year I like best. Mainly because it gives me the chance to buy presents for other people, drink alcohol in the middle of the day everyday and go to parties on a fairly regular basis. However one requires fortification for all these activities along with something to bring to all those parties, so to prevent you having to worry a minute longer about how to keep your energy up and impress the neighbours, I bring you a recipe for the easiest Christmas cookie around, German spiced lebkuchen…

I adore these soft spiced biscuits so much that I normally raid Lidl this time and year and buy about eight boxes, eating them up until Easter when I get sidetracked again by hot cross buns. So imagine my glee when I discovered a recipe for them that is so easy, so quick and so simple, I could knock up a batch in the time it took for the yeast to get ready for my doughnuts…

Oven on, I melted the butter and the remains of a bottle of honey on the stove, topping it up to the right amount with the syrup I bought for the pumpkin pie. I measured out my ingredients, delighted that I finally had a reason to use the random bag of groung almonds I’ve had knocking around in the cupboard for about a year, and added the spices, popping a pinch of mace in for good luck too. A quick stir with the spatula to combine the wet and dry and ingredients and I had a lovely soft cookie dough in under 5 minutes.

I plucked pieces off and squashed the balls of dough to make disc shapes on a greased and paper tray and baked about half the cookies in a batch since I didn’t have enough trays for all them at once. I noticed the dough dried out a bit in between, so I’d recommend wrapping it in a bit of clingfilm between batches. You can also form the discs, put paper between them and freeze them so you always can always offer fresh cookies even if people call unexpectedly. I got about 30 cookies from this recipe.

The cookies took about 12 minutes to cook and colour and I don’t find my oven runs hot, so check after 10 minutes to make sure these don’t burn. Add a moment or two more if you’re baking them from frozen. Transfer them to a wire rack and cool them for about 15 minutes if you are icing them. I tried one (just for research purposes you understand!) without the the icing and they were lovely as they were, but look a little bit insipid when left plain.

I mixed up the icing as instructed, using only one tablespoon of water and if I’m honest, I think it was a bit runny and probably didn’t really need the water at all. I iced them using a small spatula and they dripped a fair bit as the icing set, so when I do these again, I’ll skip the water and just use egg white and icing sugar.

The icing set quickly, making this a fairly simple step as you just don’t want to complicate such a simple recipe. I sneaked another one once they had set and was very pleased with how they turned out. Soft and melting (despite the lack of fat) they were warm with ginger and left a tingle thanks to the black pepper and mace that isn’t too savoury or grown up with the hint of sweetness of the icing. I imagine these being just as popular with the kids as with the adults.

These are a fantastic biscuit. Quick and easy to make, great fun to do with the kids, keep well and are much more nuanced with festive spice than shopbought versions. I didn’t expect to be considering another contender for biscuit of the year so soon after the graham crackers, but these are definitely in the running! Maybe I’ll have a seasonal category just for these?

Scotch Broth (or central heating in a bowl)

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You can’t have failed to notice that it is absolute brass monkeys out there. With bells on. I’ve certainly never seen snow this early in the winter in London and I’m immensely grateful that I don’t really have anywhere to be for the next few days so I can stay indoors and stay warm. I could either run the heat all day or I could make a bowl of serious soup to banish the chills. It was time to break out the family recipe for Scotch Broth…
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Grouse about the house…

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Mister North and I are known to like a bit of game, so it was no surprise that when this year’s season got under way, he was straight down to Stansfields in Todmorden Market to see if there was any grouse on the horizon. We were both pleased as punch when a brace of these beautiful birds materialised…

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A Gold Medal for these Grahams…

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As I’ve mentioned before, I’m a bit of an Americanophile with a particular penchant for all American foods, so imagine my glee when I discovered an online recipe for graham crackers. Forget Oreos, these are the archetypal American biscuit. Golden and honeyed, they are light and crunchy and nothing in the British biscuit family, even the digestive, quite cuts it for me.

Graham crackers are hard to describe if you haven’t had one. Their unique texture comes from the the type of flour usually used to make them. Graham flour is the brainchild of one Reverand Sylvester Graham who believed processed white flour was a devilish abombination and that bran would cure all ills. He created a type of flour that had the wheat germ and endosperm ground separately from the flour and then added back in to create a coarser flour that none the less makes exceedingly light crackers.

This flour is difficult to come by outside the USA and so I was resigned to the fact that I would only be able to indulge my graham cracker love while on holiday or when friends brought me boxes back in their suitcases. But this recipe uses regular plain flour! Time to go crackers methinks and risk the fact the use of processed flour might inflame my carnal desires…

I was originally planning to use these crackers to make a base for a pumpkin pie. They would have been crushed and mixed with butter to make a crumb based crust somewhat like one can do with a digestive or two when making cheesecake. However on first reading the recipe seemed too complicated to start baking something just to destroy it again and I decided to go with a traditional pastry pie shell instead.

I was also pleased that upon thorough reading to see that the recipe for the crackers is actually incredibly easy. I was just thrown by the talk of different mixers with a large selection of attachments making it lot trickier than it is. I don’t have a mixer so I assembled my ingredients (all easily found in the store cupboard, nothing fancy) and decided to give it a go by hand. Apart from it taking twice as long to crumble the butter because it was frozen rather than chilled, this is was so easy I cannot understand why anyone would bother making washing up by using a mixer.

About five minutes after I started mixing it all, I had a gorgeous golden dough flecked with sugar and stiff enough to wrap easily in clingfilm and chill in the fridge overnight. The recipe mentioned it would be rather sticky, but I didn’t find that at all. I wonder if this was because I used golden caster sugar rather than a muscavado or because plain flour is slightly different to all purpose flour? Either way the dough was a dream to handle and I ddin’t need all the flour I put on the clingfilm or the work surface.

Next morning I had a well chilled dough that was still easy to handle. Deb mentions in her recipe using a pastry wheel to cut the crackers into traditional rectangles, but since no graham cracker has ever lasted long enough in front of me to notice the shape, I decided to go off piste and cut them in star shapes instead. The dough cut easily and the scraps came back together well too. I used half the dough, rolled out to about an 1/8 of an inch and got around 40 biscuits from it.

I placed them on lined trays and sprinkled the sugar cinnamon topping over them before popping the trays in the fridge for around half an hour. Cooking the dough from chilled should make the crackers even lighter and crispier so it’s not worth skipping this stage. They then went in the preheated oven at 180˚C for about 12 minutes before they were perfectly cooked. I cooled them on a rack and lasted about 3 minutes before I snaffled one of them.

And they were fantastic. Buttery but light, beautifully crisp and infused with honey, they crunched gorgeously when I bit into them. The scattering of sugar on top made them even crunchier and the hint of cinnamon was perfect with the flavour of honey. It took such willpower not to stuff my face with one after another until they were all gone (and then admit that to my now biscuitless friends what I had done). I managed to get some on a plate and serve them up.

It probably says a lot about how delicious and moreish these graham crackers are that there was only one solitary biscuit remaining at the end of an afternoon so filled with baked goods we didn’t even manage to get round to one of the cheesecakes…they might be my favourite thing to have baked this year and I strongly urge you to try them immediately. I have no idea if they keep well, but I don’t think you’ll have any left to store!

Broccoli Slaw

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I haven’t seen my lovely friend A in several months as she’s been Stateside sampling lobsters and fresh corn on the Maine coast, but thanks to the power of the Internet, she has managed to give me a truly fantastic gift in the shape of this recipe for broccoli slaw from Smitten Kitchen…

Fresh and simple, it re-invented the wheel somewhat for me in how I eat my favourite vegetable. I could eat broccoli with everything including breakfast, but I had never thought to try it raw until now. And it is revolutionary. It tastes fresher, less boarding house brassica in after taste and is addictively crunchy in texture. And of course, if you’re feeling lazy, it makes it even easier to get your 5 a day than getting the steamer out and playing the waiting game.

While I was immediately interested in this lovely sounding slaw, I also automatically started making plans to change the recipe. Deb suggests using her buttermilk dressing, but after my recent buttermilk disaster, I am steering well clear of the stuff until I can find a decent source. I was also perturbed by the amount of sugar and mayonnaise in it. If I’m going to eat raw veggies I want them to be super healthy (so that I can keep my fat intake for a nice cheese elsewhere). I also don’t like dried fruit in savoury dishes and find dried cranberries to be extremely expensive. And I didn’t have any flaked almonds…

So instead I made a dressing from live yoghurt with a big splash of cider vinegar and some salt and pepper. Creamy, yet tangy it goes beautifully with the broccoli and is low fat and easy while not creating any washing up as it can be mixed straight into the slaw. I then perked it up with some thinly sliced red onion, a handful of pumpkin seeds and in a flash of inspiration, some fresh pomegranate seeds. Super healthy and incredibly pretty!

And amazingly tasty! Those little jewels of pomegranate burst on the tongue with a explosion of sweet juicy deliciousness, the onion crunches with taste and the pumpkin seeds add extra taste filled texture to the mix of vegetables and the whole thing is just perfect!

I have made this six or seven times since getting the recipe just under a fortnight ago. I’ve eaten it on its own, with a steak, with a stew and with an avocado salad. I made it for the lunch at the most recent Invisible Food Walk and it went down a storm, even with the littlest walkers who loved the colours and textures. I just can’t get enough of this fresh feast and even though I will probably make myself ill by eating too much of it in the future, I can’t urge you enough to try this.

Make a big batch, knowing that it will keep well in the fridge and then amaze yourself by managing to eat it all in one veg-tastic sitting before having to make some more to satisfy the broccoli lust it will inspire!