Karen Wright: Tasty festive recipes on ‘Stir up Sunday’
This weekend it is ‘Stir Up Sunday,’ which always falls on the last Sunday before Advent.
Traditionally, this is when you make your Christmas puddings, and all the family take a turn stirring and making a wish as they do so. When I was a child, we used to add sixpences or threppenny bits to the mixture for an extra thrill on Christmas day, who would find a coin in their pudding!
This year I am not intending to make my own pudding and will buy one instead, but I have already made my Christmas cakes. This year when I was recuperating from my surgery, I had my daughters stay with me to help out. My youngest girl Vanessa has always enjoyed baking, so I asked her if she would give me a hand.
Although I have my own recipe on my website (www.karenwrightbakes.co.uk – give it a try!), this year I decided to simplify things a bit and use one written by Nancy Birtwistle who won the Great British Bake Off a few years ago.
The recipe seemed very straightforward and with fewer ingredients than usual, also she recommended baking on a very low heat for about ten hours! She said this would result in moist cakes that don’t need to be fed with booze every week. My cakes baked in about seven hours and look great, but I can’t resist treating them to a drink of brandy now and again.
It was lovely to bake with my daughter, and it brought back fond memories of my childhood when I would help my Mum with the Christmas baking which included the pudding, the cake and the mince pies. We always had a large round cake plus a couple of loaves too. We marzipanned and iced the big cake but left the loaves as they were to enjoy with a chunk of cheese. One of my favourite things was being allowed a sip of sherry with cake and cheese on Christmas Eve.
I loved the look of the cakes back in the sixties and seventies – everyone tended to do the same thing: ice the cake with royal icing that was forked into rough peaks to resemble snow. We always had a paper ruffle around the sides and the same decorations came out every year to stick on the top. Believe it or not I still decorate my cake like that to this day!