Christmas baking! Including The Seven Kinds!

Last year we didn't get to do much Christmas baking as we had to leave for Norway last minute, so this year I made sure I did LOTS! Including a gingerbread house, seven kinds of Norwegian biscuits, accidental chilli sachertorte, failed croquembouche, gingerbread tree and festive chocolates.

First I'll start with the gingerbread house, I tried to make one last year but I made the dough too soft and it all fell to pieces in a slow but spectacular fashion, this year we made far better one - it stood up and everything.  Because of last year's epic failure I was given a gingerbread house cutter set which made getting even side much easier. We went very much for the old Hansel and Gretel theme with the front and sides decorated with piping icing, candy canes and heart windows. the roof was decorated with piped tiles, mini smarties and a Norwegian and Union Jack flag. We then sat it on a lawn of snow (icing sugar), edged with smaries and placed one of my sprakly gingerbread candy candles on the snow because it looked pretty :) Fact.

Now for the seven kinds, every Christmas every house must make seven kinds of Christmas biscuits apparently it used be to show that you weren't poor so you could afford to make so many kinds. Now we do it because we're greedy and want to put as many in our faces as we can at any given time over the festive period...as fast as we can, or is that just us? There are loads of different kinds you can choose from so our seven were: pepperkaker (gingerbread), krumkaker (crispy cones), sirupsnipper (syrup snaps), serinakaker, goro (rich man cookies), berlinerkranser (Berlin wreaths) and sandkaker (sand cakes). The krumkaker and goro you need a special iron to make them with, lucky for us we have them and this was the first time we made goro, it wasn't my favourite but it looks so nice! My favourite has to be krumkaker and serinkaker which is a gorgeous short biscuits covered in nuts and pearl sugar...actually the berlinerkanser were also very short, buttery and covered in sugar - always a winner! We gave them out to family for Christmas as we made so many which was a nice extra gift to give and still have enough left over for work tomorrow, bonus!

Left to right:
Krumkaker, sirupsnipper, goro and pepperkaker
The pigs say 'God Jul' which is Merry Christmas in Norwegian,
printed with a biscuit stamp I was sent by the lovely Sew White

Berlinerkranser

 Left to right:
Sandkaker, serinakaker and berlinerkranser

decorated Pepperkaker

Now the sachertorte, my sister-in-laws parents have been asking me to make them one for ages, about a year and I keep forgetting so I thought this would be a lovely gift, unfortunately without realising I put in chilli chocolate instead of dark...and didn't realise until after..but..BUT apparently it baked out and you couldn't taste it (we didn't tell them what I did and my brother reported back!)

Failed croquembouche..now I have actually successfully made one before so I was quite gutted it all went to .... sugar. We've had a new oven fitted and in short, I hate it. I hate baking in it which is why my posts have been a bit thin on the ground recently. But we're moving soon so hopefully the cooker there will be much better :). The profiteroles just didn't dry out properly inside and I should have compensated by adding more caramel for structural support, but I didn't - and it all fell apart before my eyes. So in the end it ended up as a profiterole pile covered in chocolate, spun sugar, snowflakes, gold balls and gold leaf. We had this on Christmas even as this is when we celebrate Christmas being vikings and while it didn't end up looking how I wanted, it still tasted great.

You've seen the gingerbread tree before but here's another picture, it was visually great and tasted really nice, I'll definitely be making one next year!

And last but not least the festive chocolates. I made some to give away which included glittery Christmas puddings (mould bought from Sew White) and some patterned after dinner mints. These were basically mint flavoured chocolates spread over snowflake chocolate transfers and just before they set I just them out into cute shapes such as moose, heart and snowflakes. These were great after a heavy made and looked great too.

I still have lots of Christmas baking stuff I didn't get a chance to use so hopefully I'll get round to it next year! I will also be putting up a photo post from Christmas :)

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Limoncello and White Choclate Croquembouche

Until I watched The Great British Bake Off on tuesday I will be honest and say I hadn't heard of a croquembouche before...profiteroles sure, but done like this? Never. And instantly I just knew I HAD to make one.

Luckily my lovely mother had bought me the latest GBBO book 'How To Bake'. Last season's book, which I baked my Somerset Apple Cider Cake from was brilliant, like a bible. This one is more Mary Berry inspired and very girl which is great. It's gives great step by step guides and shows you in pictures how to do things and what it's supposed to look like which is a godsend. Full of pastel colours and gorgeous photography,  I was so happy to see they featured one of the croquembouches from the show inside, so this was the one I decided I had to make, with limoncello and white chocolate. I could post the whole recipe from start to finish but then it would turn into an essay and I don't want to bore you - so I'll post the limcello and white chocolate bit, as while the choux pastry recipe was good, I think it's just as good any recipe I've used before so I'm sure you can find another in one of your cookbooks or online.

I hadn't made profiteroles before, only eclairs, which are similar but I still had only done those a couple of times but I love choux pastry so I was determined to do it right. It's not as lengthy as you imagine in itself but all in all it did take a few hours from start to finish as you have to let bits cool and stand for a while so it all added up, trust me though it is worth it. I know it's a bit of an extravagant recipe to just decide to do for fun, but I did downsize it to about a quarter of the size of what they did on the show, so it was ok :)

You do need a croquembouche cone, though I didn't have one and I've heard they're quite expensive, so I made mine with a left over cake box lid and some foil. I wrapped the foil over the card and twisted it into a wide cone shape and taped it all up together and leveled it so it stood straight. Voila, and costs next to nothing. I did it with foil rather than baking paper as I was worried the baknig paper would tear on the caramel which would be gutting in the end stage!

The hard part for me was the caramel, I hadn't made it like this before so I didn't really know what to expect and stupidly thought it would be easy as there were only two ingredients...wrong! It took me three attempts, nearly a kilo of sugar, and after number two I had run out of saucepans after filling up the dishwasher and my patient grew thin when realising how fickle sugar is! But I managed to rustle up another saucepan, a bigger one this time and I think that was part of the trick. I burned it the last two times and kept on cooking it. This time when I got to the right temperature and it hadn't quite lots all of the massive sugar clumps that had formed, I turned it down and kept the correct temperature whilst actually stirring it (even though they told you to NEVER do that on the show) and third time lucky it turned out beautifully. So do be patient with it and give it a bit more time than you may expect. The only thing I think I would change would be to add some more double cream to the filling as it was a little loose and kinda spilled out everywhere when you tore a bit off to eat so it could have down with being a bit thicker.

Right enough waffling here's the recipe:

Limoncello and White Chocolate Croquembouche

Ingredients:

• 2 recipe quantities of profiteroles
  (about 96)
• 300g caster sugar for the caramel
• caster sugar for the spun sugar

Filling:

• 4 large egg yolks
• 75g caster sugar
• 25g plain flour
• finely grated zest of one lemon
• 250ml full fat milk
• 150g white chocolate
• 1 tablespoon limoncello
• Sugar flowers to decorate (optional - I didn't use them)

You will also need a piping bag with a 0.5cm plain tube, cake board (I just used a plate) a sugar thermometer,  croquembouche con.

Method:

1. To make the filling, whisk the egg yolks in a bowl with the sugar, flour, lemon zest and one-third of the milk until smooth. Heat the rest of the milk in a medium pan until almost boiling, then pour onto the yolk mixture, stirring constantly. Return to the pan and cook, whisking constantly, until the mixture boils and thickens. Simmer for one minute, whisking, cooking out the flour taste and cool until lukewarm.
2. Meanwhile, gently melt the chocolate in a heatproof bowl set over a pan of steaming hot water but not boiling water (don't let the baste of the bowl touch the water). Cool until lukewarm, then whisk the chocolate into the custard, followed by the limoncello. Cover and chill for at least an hour before folding in the whipped cream.
3. When ready to assemble the croquembouche, spoon the filling into the piping bag. Pipe into the cool profiteroles through the steam hole, taking care not to overfill (to avoid leaking).
4. To make the caramel, dissolve the sugar in 4 tablespoons of water in a medium pan, stirring occasionally (again this is odd as they did say to never actually stir it, so I mainly just swirled it around).  Once the has sugar has dissolved bring to the boil and boil rapidly to a light caramel (160 degrees celcius / 320 Fahrenheit) Immediately plunge the base of the pan into cold water for 20 seconds to halt the cooking.
5. Place your cake board on the worktop. Working quickly, dip one side of each profiterole in the hot caramel (be careful not to burn yourself it's crazy hot)  and stick them together inside the cone. You can also just freestyle it into a pyramid. If the caramel 'glue' starts to set you can loosen it up again by heating it gently.  Leave the croquembouche in a cool to set. This shouldn't really take to long.
6. For the spun sugar you can make the caramel again, but I had some left over so I used that, after it's been in the cold water for 20 seconds let it settle for 5 minutes. Hold a couple of forks in one hand, dip the tines in the caramel and lift them out and flick strands of caramel over the assembled croquembouche. Stop as soon as the caramel starts to set and becomes thick. Decorate with sugar flowers if you would like.
7. Destroy and eat! Nom!

I hope you all made it through the recipe I know it's lengthy -
so you can see why I didn't want to write up the choux pastry recipe too!

1. Place your cake

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