Ladies and gentlemen... may I present my Christmas cake, in all its dense, fruity glory. Please notice the glorious chunks of nuts, the array of dried fruits, and the moist-yet-crumbly texture.

This year my Christmas baking started early. I made this cake a month ago, and have since been feeding it with rum every once a week. At first, I wasn't sure which Christmas cake to bake - I have previously enjoyed Nigella's Chocolate Fruit Cake, her Marzipan Fruit Cake, or my mum's wonderful Golden Fruit Cake. And y'all know I have a million Christmassy cookbooks vying for my attention. In the end, I chose Nigel Slater's Christmas Cake, from his Kitchen Diaries book. Apparently, this is his standard, bake-every-year Christmas cake. If it's good enough for Nigel...


The cake starts with a wonderfully caramel-coloured base of creamed butter and muscovado sugars. There is no need to soak the fruits beforehand, all you do is chop them and add to the batter.

There are a wide variety of fruits in this cake - prunes, apricots, figs, candied peel, glacé cherries, raisins, sultanas, currents and cranberries! Interesting additions are ground almonds and whole, shelled hazelnuts. Nigel suggests icing it with either marzipan or a snowdrift icing of eggwhite and golden unrefined icing sugar. Iced Christmas cakes look so pretty, and I always mean to ice mine (I even have the ready-to-roll icing in my pantry!) However, I hate the taste of this icing, and I can never bring myself to cover my fruit cakes with it. Maybe one year I will be braver.

Instead, I covered the top of the cake with almonds, Dundee-Cake style.


The recipe makes quite a large amount of batter, so I made some individual mini Christmas Cakes too.



I tried one as soon as it came out of the oven, and it was reasonably light, despite all the fruit. With the rest of the cakes, I let them cool, drizzled with brandy and wrapped well. Each week I've been feeding the cakes with a spoonful of brandy.

I've been giving away the mini cakes as gifts when I've been going to friends' places for Christmas parties, but it wasn't until Sunday that I tasted some matured cake for myself. We had some old family friends over for afternoon tea, and unveiled the cake (as well as some mince pies and petits sablés - but those are a story for another post).


During the maturation time, the cake seems to have become slightly darker, and the flavour developed quite a bit. It was delectably moist, and I loved the crunch provided by the nuts and dried figs. The cake was quite crumbly, so it was difficult to slice thinly (our guests thought big pieces of fruit cake might be too rich for them!). Perhaps baking it in a square tin would make it easier to cut smaller pieces. For me though, no such delicate slices are required - give me a thick slab and a big mug of tea any day.

We've got about a third of the cake left, which will probably be polished off over the next couple of weeks. Lucky me.

It is a fabulous recipe - I think this will be my go-to-Christmas Cake from now on!

Biggest discovery of 2009. I have a freakin' huge plum tree in my front yard!

And it has a lot of fruit.


Yes, a LOT of fruit...

When I was a kid, this tree would bear fruit every single summer. I have vivid memories of standing under the tree picking off the sweet plums and eating these juicy juicy fruit. Then one year, it stopped giving fruit and I kinda forgot all about it. Until last week, when the abundance of plums in the front yard was brought to my attention.

If you have a look below, you'll see that they are small yellow (sometimes green) plums, and are very very juicy.


Yesterday, we had my friend An over for a casual lunch - Nigella's maple chicken 'n' ribs, no dessert planned (really!). After we'd eaten, we suddenly decided we'd like a little something sweet, and we whipped up some plum cake. We made it on the fly, based on Nigel Slater's very fast nectarine and blackberry cake. Sandra and An stoned the plums, and I made the cake batter - a simple Victoria Sponge, which we baked in mini-loaf tins. We sprinkled over demerara sugar for extra crunch.


25 minutes in the oven, and ta-dah!


I loved the way the cakes billowed up crispily. Because the plums were so very juicy, the cakes were very very soft, and I had to be very careful to get them out of the tin without breaking them. For some reason, they also turned out quite buttery, almost greasy. Perhaps I didn't cream the butter and sugar sufficiently?


However, apart from that, the cakelets were very tasty, with a great contrast between the sweet cake and sharp plums. I'm also a big fan of crispy edges, so I'm really happy we made them in mini! We ate them hot, with cold cold cream. Divine.


Now that I'm in the mood for plums, I've got heaps and heaps of things I want to make - Pflaummenkuchen, Pflaumenkrapfen (German plum DONUTS), plum tart, plum crumble, plum jam...

Anyone got any great ideas on what to do with an abundance of yellow plums??

Now for a change of pace...

Risotto ai cavolfiore

In between all the Christmas baking, I am still (attempting to) cook and eat normal meals in between. On Tuesday night, I suddenly had a craving for risotto, and so, set about cooking one!

This recipe comes from Jamie's Italy, and starts with a base of standard white risotto.


Pieces of cauliflower are cooked slowly in the hot stock, which is added to the rice in ladlefulls.


This results in a cauliflower-flavoured white risotto! I was considering adding some cream, but after adding a generous knob of butter and some grated Parmesan cheese, the risotto became creamy enough. The recipe calls for chopped parsley, but as I had none on hand, I substituted chopped chives. Unconventional, yes, but I just adore them.


Another touch that Jamie adds is an anchovy pangratto, for flavour and crunch. This involves taking cubes of stale bread, and whizzing them up with anchovies and dried chilli.
Cubes of light rye

The crumbs are then fried in a little oil until crispy.

And just because I can no longer resist setting the table...

The candle holder was cheaply bought at Ikea!


This was a very easy weeknight dinner, 30 minutes work all up, and all the more appealing for the rarity of the flavour. I liked the mild taste of cauliflower, and whilst the pangratto added interesting crunch and colour-contrast, I found the taste too strong, overpowering the delicate risotto. In future I would just season generously with Parmesan and salt, and either parlsey or chives.

Nigella's Pistachio Crescents

Sunday night marked the second Advent, as well as our first Christmas dinner for the year. For many, the holidays are a time to catch up with friends and loved ones, and to reflect on the year gone by. For me, it is also a time to squeeze in as many recipes, afternoon teas, dinner parties, barbecues and lunches as I possibly can! It's only the 7th of December and this is already my second Christmas post - eeek!


A Casual Holiday Meal for 3

Party Poussins
Roast Butternut Squash and Cumin Carrots
Festive Couscous
Vanillekipferl / Pistachio Crescents


The savoury part of the meal was from Nigella Christmas' Come on Over chapter, which includes simple yet festive menus that you can cook when you have friends over during the holiday season. How apt! It's been ages since I'd done a full Nigella menu, or even cooked a proper meal (thank-you crazy work timetable and post-holiday blues!), so I was very happy to be getting back into the kitchen.

I eschewed Nigella's suggested dessert of chocolate-chestnut pots, in favour of more Christmassy fare. I baked my beloved Vanillekipferl, as well as some pistachio crescents. The pistachio biscuits are from How to Eat, (previously made here), and I think of them as a Middle-Eastern version of Vanillekipferl - in-keeping with the theme of the menu.

The biscuits undoubtedly required a lot more time and effort than the rest of the meal, so I made them first. The Vanillekipferl recipe is here - you can thank me later. To make the pistachio crescents, I started by blanching and peeling the shelled pistachios. It's a tedious task, but it makes the finished product so much more intensely green and beautiful.


The denuded pistachios are then pulverised in a blender, and added to butter, icing sugar and flour to make a nubbly green dough.

Crescents ready for baking

And the lovely, buttery result is that plate of biscuits you see at the top of this post.

Below we have a generous plate of Vanillekipferl - the pretty plastic plate is from Balha's. It's good to make a big batch, as most of them will get eaten before you get a chance to share them.

As you might expect for a Nigella menu, the dinner itself is very easy to put together. Just drizzle the chopped pumpkin with spices and oil, do the same with the unchopped poussin, stuff them with garlic cloves and lemon pieces, and put everything into a hot oven for an hour. The couscous is very, very quick - all you need to do is pour hot water over couscous, cranberries and spices and wait 10 minutes. If you were organised and purchased everything in advance, I think this menu would be do-able for a midweek dinner.

The low-prep, long-cook procedure gives you heaps of time to clear up the kitchen and set the table. Ta-dah!

The table: check out the Adventkranz and my colour co-ordinated, cravat-folded Ikea paper napkins.

When I first started blogging, I used to be very apathetic about place settings and decor, but times have changed. At the bare minimum, I like to set the table before my friends arrive, so that they know they're welcome and I'm expecting them. As I get older I plan to increase my collection of table runners, cloth napkins, napkin rings and the like, but for now I'm sticking to colourful Ikea paper napkins and my trusty brown Vue cloth napkins that my bro and his GF bought me for my bday.

After about 30 minutes of roasting, the kitchen started to fill with the most delightful smell of garlicky roast chicken.

One poussin, some veggies, couscous.

There is something very festive and special about getting your own mini-chicken, which, due to the high cooking temperature, was wonderfully crispy. I should add that the chickens weren't actually poussins, but were labelled as "spatchcocks", haha. Either way, the mini-chicken was both juicy within and crispy without - this is a balance I struggle with when roasting full-sized chickens. If you cook them at a high-enough temperature for the skin to get crisp, the meat can tend to dry out.

The couscous - I forgot to buy coriander for sprinkling over, so it looked a bit plain, but tasted great.

The vegetables were gorgeous - we added carrots because there were some lying in the fridge - and the heat of the oven really intensified the sweetness of both pumpkin and carrots. I was really pleased with the warm golden colours too!

Action shot:


And that was my first Christmas dinner of the year!

In der Weihnachtsbäckerei... In the Christmas bakery...


It was first Advent on Sunday last week, so it was time to light up the candles, and get my Christmas baking started! There are four Advents before Christmas, or as I like to think of them, four opportunities to get my baking on, hehehe!

I decided on Spekulatius, from my Dr Oetker Backen Macht Freude book. You might know these as spekulaas, those addictively crisp and spicy Dutch Christmas biscuits. Spekulatius is the German version.


The dough includes almond meal, and a heady mix of cinnamon, ground cloves and cardamom.

You just can't make German Gebäck without Vanillin-Zucker and little vials of Aromen!

The instructions simply tell you to mix everything together and knead to a smooth dough. (At least I'm pretty sure that's what they said - they were in German, after all).

It took quite a bit of kneading to get a smooth dough - I think it might have been more effective if I'd creamed the butter and sugar first, and then added the rest of the ingredients slowly.

I didn't have a funky wooden mould like the one in the book's photo, so went for gingerbread-people, and rectangles with flaked almonds.



These were lovely - just the right amount of spice, and a pleasantly chunky texture from the ground almonds. A few of the biscuits were slightly overcooked and hard; my bad, I should have taken them out of the oven when they had just turned a lovely light brown colour. Most of them, however, were just delicious.


So, dear friends, for the next 4 weeks, my kitchen is turning into eine Weihnachtsbäckerei (a Christmas-bakery). And no, I didn't just come up with that myself. Here is the inspiration! In der Weihnachtsbäckerei - a totally kitsch, totally German Christmas song, sung by Andy Borg & heartthrob (apparently) Florian Silbereisen. Guaranteed to get you in the Christmas spirit. Click play. If you dare...

That magnificent creature above is a Birgus lato, or a coconut crab! Coconut crabs are quite the delicacy in Vanuatu. Before my trip, I'd heard of Vanuatu's famous coconut crab, but I assumed that it was a way of preparing crab, not an actual species. D'oh! These crabs are called coconut crab because they eat coconut!

When I was in Vanuatu, coconut crabs were available in many restaurants but - gasp! - I never ate one. There were 2 reasons for this.

First, they're endangered! Apparently sometimes the Vanuatu government places restrictions on harvesting, to protect the population. No bans were in place at the time, but I did not feel comfortable ordering them.

And second, they are one of the freakiest creatures I have EVER seen.

During our trip, we went on a (rather disappointing and expensive) "river kayak" tour, at Blue Water Island resort. The website makes the resort look shiny and new, but in reality it is very tired and old - our tour guide (who was lovely!!) told us there were no guests at all. It's half an hour out of town, in the middle of nowhere, and it felt like it was on the verge of repossession. I'm not sure if it was because of the poor location, or maybe the owners just stopped caring.

They did have some cool stuff though, including pools where you could feed reef sharks and beautiful big turtles. And a couple of cages of coconut crabs!

Argh! It looks like a massive creepy spider!



Check out those massive claws.

According to Wikipedia...

The coconut crab climbs trees to eat coconuts or fruit... Coconut crabs cut holes into coconuts with their strong claws and eat the contents; this behaviour is unique in the animal kingdom.

It was only a couple of days later, on a much better snorkelling tour to Paradise Cove, that we realised just how strong those freaky coconut crab-claws must be.

Aah... Paradise Cove

Part of our tour included a coconut demonstration, where our tour guide broke down a coconut.


The coconut is twisted on a stick to loosen the husk...

...and he uses a lot of strength to pry the husk away from the coconut.

Apparently the husk is used in many ways - for toothbrushes, as bedding for chickens, for kids to play with as little sailboats, to make bags and more!

Then he whacks the coconut several times with a big rock before he breaks it open...

... and we can all feast on the sweet coconut within.

It took him about 10 minutes all up, using a lot of strength and a sharp stick and rock. And these coconut crabs can do it WITH THEIR CLAWS!!


Previous visitors to Vanuatu - was anyone else more adventurous than me? Or less concerned by dwindling coconut crab populations? What did you think of it? (I know Ed ate some!)

***EDIT*** The first photo was taken at our hotel, held up by one of the lovely (and obliging) chefs, when a few of us sneaked to the kitchen to look at the many fascinating coconut crabs that had just arrived.***