Happy Christmas!

In case you were wondering, the moment I broke about not being able to go home for Christmas was, of course, during the last minute of The Snowman.

I was forty-one years old.¹

But! Yes, it was not the Christmas we were expecting, but we still had a good time, with foam bullets flying here there and everywhere. And now, a rundown on THINGS THAT WERE MADE!

• Preston Bus Station — a moderate success. It didn’t exactly match the idea in my head, but I don’t think the gingerbread would have maintained integrity if the bay sections had been too much longer.
• ANZAC biscuits — simple but tasty!
• Bakewell tart — I’m actually getting pretty good at these by now.
• Pavé potatoes — Yes, I did make a Thomas Keller recipe and then slathered it with HP Sauce. You’d have done the same.
• Tiffin — dubbed the Marie Antoinette Tiffin after I realized I had made it with Valrhona chocolate, amaretti biscuits imported from Italy, and raisins soaked in Foursquare Rum. I will be first up against the wall when the revolution comes. But I did also buy a three-year subscription to Tribune this Christmas, so maybe that offsets some of the crimes?
• Mince Pies — I decided against going to Jungle Jim’s again this month, so instead I built my own mincemeat using this recipe from The Guardian. Complete with a single malt from Oban.
• Sous Vide Carnitas — cooked for 24 hours and always great.
• The Roses tin. This consisted of:
  • Dark / Mint / Milk / Orange Neapolitans — made the custom molds I had made back in September. Perfect for the Cadbury miniature machine you have stashed away in your loft somewhere.
  • Milk chocolate & hazelnut — straight out of the Roses tin circa 1984
  • Hazelnut and Caramel — from the Roses tin in 1985.
  • Muscovado Ganache — om!
  • Laddie — a bit of an afterthought, but it actually turned out to be one of the best chocolates I’ve ever made. A water ganache with a shot of The Classic Laddie added.
  • Toffee — what happens when you cook caramel just a touch too far? Why, a festive treat that you always intended to make and not something that happened because you weren’t paying attention to the induction hob, oh no.
• Christmas Dinner — I think my favourite part of this was that there were no surprises. A standard roast dinner with everything that just came together at the right time (okay, some burning of the parsnips and carrots, but that was actually a popular outcome) and shared with everybody.
• The Black Forest.

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Again, I feel this didn’t turn out exactly how I’d have really liked (there’s actually four more trees in the freezer. Oh, and I should probably mention that Tammy and Robert saved Christmas by loaning me their new freezer after mine apparently died last weekend), but the trees that did get sprayed do look good. Inside, they’re a mixture of Luxardo cherry, kirsch white chocolate namelaka, kirsch 71% water ganache, milk chocolate & almond discs, and supported by a dark chocolate cake. The snowmen are white chocolate panna cotta, with a Migoya-inspired liquid red cake ball inside. I didn’t come to play. Oh, and the logs are a fig & cinnamon ganache coated in velvet spray, because my log wall mold didn’t arrive in time.

There’s a few more desserts to come next week, but the week of dawn-to-dusk baking has drawn to an end. Tomorrow is Boxing Day, of course, and I will be having Mexican / British fusion (carnitas sandwiches with brown sauce. Trust me they’re going to be great), and attempting to make pickled onion crisps like a crazy man.