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The Most Wonderful Time of the Year

Holiday baking is upon us. The supermarkets are festooned with all things Christmas, and our favourite restaurants have started putting up the decorations. One shouldn’t come home in November to discover that an errant piece of tinsel has hitchhiked home on your sweater. The end of November seemed ages away from the actuality of Christmas when I was a child, but now it seems alarmingly close. So much to do! There are gifts to buy, of course, and social events to coordinate – calendars to be consulted, conflicting event dates to be navigated, the location of the family gathering for this particular year – and most of all, food decisions to be made.

Oh, I know, there’s more to it than that, for a lot of families. There are decorations to consider, card sending, the arranging of family photos in advance to be mailed out to the distant friends and relatives – the list goes on as much as you like, really. For me, no surprise, the primary focus is on the food. Our family was fairly staunch in its traditional centerpiece: Christmas Eve was (also my mother’s birthday) ham at my paternal grandparents’ house followed by traditional English trifle, a treat we only had once each year. Christmas day dinner, at home, was the classic roast turkey with all the trimmings.

Trimmings, whether you lean toward Brussels sprouts, yams, cranberry sauce, stuffing/dressing or whatever your traditions dictate, are generally items that can be assembled at the last minute – or at least on the day or day before – of the big feast itself. If the main dish of turkey, or ham, or lamb is a foregone conclusion, that brings us down to the last, but most time consuming of all, Christmas and holiday related food: the baking.

There is a distinct hierarchy in the Christmas baking. The first thing to be done, because it is both traditional and (in my youth) unthinkably grinch-like not to have it, is fruitcake. Don’t flinch…it’s really nothing like the leaden, dry-as-dust doorstops they sell in the supermarkets. My mother’s fruitcake was dark, moist, full of fruit and nuts with precious few of the neon cherries that are often the hallmark of holiday baking. Not content with simple raisins and candied peel, there were also figs, dates, apricots, prunes, and slivers of glacée pineapple. The fruitcake that I make these days, on the years that I do make it, is quite similar except that I have forgone the peel and cherries entirely for dried sour cherries, and candied turnip – which sounds revolting, but is cut into tiny, syrupy squares like peel. I use dried blueberries, two kinds of raisins, and whatever other treasures strike my fancy. My mother soaked her cakes with a splash of rum, and I alternate between rum, bourbon and whisk(e)y, depending on what I have on hand. There is another overwhelming reason to make this first, as it takes about six weeks to cure properly, for the flavours to meld and the nuts to soften into cut-ability.

Ah, curing time. Since fruitcake takes the longest, it had to be done first. Next on the list were Kalter-Schnauze, which translates variously as “cold snout” or “cold lip.” It is a layered confection of rum-spiked chocolate melted with palmin, with rows of tea-biscuits set into each layer as it is poured. My mother convinced us that these also needed at least three weeks of curing time, but I realize that this was just to keep us out of the treats until she was ready to serve them.

Next in line were the Nanaimo bars – we kids took over making these at an early age, and suffered under the delusion that they needed at least a week of curing time, as we watched the goodies stack up in the futility room – which gained whole new depths of meaning at that time of year.

By this point it was usually approaching mid-December, and then we really stepped up production. Shortbread, and lots of it, because shortbread is the undisputed Queen of Christmas Baking. Sugar cookies, because they were fun to roll out and cut into festive shapes. Tarts – both butter tarts and mincemeat were required, and this concluded our required list of Christmas baking. This is not to presume that the frenzy of sugar ended there – there were plenty of optional goodies, such as gingerbread, ginger snaps, cranberry oat squares, and sometimes even a few store-bought treats – pfeffernussen being a hands-down favourite.

As time went on, the list was shortened, because there were fewer people to consume the goodies. When I first started celebrating Christmas on my own, it was a strange thing to contemplate. I quickly decided that it was sensible only to make a few things, although I also discovered that Christmas baking made an inexpensive-yet-richly-appreciated gift for friends. I tend to vacillate between baking items, now, picking just one or two things and leaving it at that.

It’s a little funny, but aside from shortbread and the occasional go at fruitcake, some of my favourite things to make now are goodies that I discovered as an adult. My sister’s candy cane cookies are always a big hit, and they’re so easy and fun to make that it hardly feels like work, so I tend to make them quite often at Christmas. My own discovery, pulled from the slightly snooty pages of Fine Cooking magazine, are for French butter cookies. I make mine in a checkerboard pattern – tiny, delicate, almost dainty bite-sized cookies that are cut from a pre-assembled log of dough that sits patiently in the freezer until you are ready for it. The fact that I can bake as I go is a powerful motivator to keep these on my list, but the truth of the matter is that they make so many cookies that for one evening’s work, I can feel as though the majority of my holiday baking obligations* can be met with this one baking event.

This year, it feels late in the game, and I haven’t yet decided what to make. A small batch of buttery shortbread, for sure, but the other items are a mystery. Tarts are fiddly and I’m the only one in the house who would be enthused about them, so they’re out. I know that I could purchase tart shells that would take much of the fuss out of it, but that really feels like cheating somehow. I’m not entirely sure why, since I’ve got no reservations about buying pfeffernusse, but there it is. Should I branch out into chocolate crinkles? Should I use the French butter cookie dough to make pinwheels instead of checkerboards? Should I revive the truffle-making parties my friends Paul and Emeric used to throw, or maybe just make a little batch, just for us? The decisions are endless.

Another factor in my determination of the year’s goodies is that Palle cannot eat cranberries. At least half-a-dozen different holiday possibilities float away, because while he insists that he will neither starve nor be offended if I go ahead and make cranberry treats, the sad reality is that if I make them, I will be the only one eating them and so I’d really rather not be faced with the reality that I’ve eaten an entire batch of something all by myself. If we have a holiday open house, I might well do something along those lines, so I can at least pretend that I’m not the greediest pastry-munching creature in the world.

Yesterday, I bought a copy of the Cook’s Illustrated Holiday Baking Issue.  It has everything from pecan sandies through pumpkin cheesecake and adorable-looking sticky-toffee puddings, but I thought that the illustration on the back, the classic holiday cookies, would have been more tempting. I’m not sure if I’ll use it this year, but I’ll definitely keep it on file for next.

*placed on me by myself, I confess
 

November 2005