Wake up Amaryllis!

If you, like me, love to decorate your home with majestic Amaryllis flowers at Christmas time I can recommend these two beautiful little films from Zeta's Trädgård showing you how to 'awaken' the bulb before planting it...

I have always planted my Amaryllis bulbs into pots without this 'awakening' step and they have been consistently late in flowering, so a few days ago I yanked my 'Apple Blossom' bulb out of its pot, brushed off the compost and perched it on a bulb vase with the root shoots trailing in water. When these roots have perked up I will remove any withered root shoots and plant the bulb back in the pot - hopefully it will grow a bit faster this way.

Soft Lilac - Another kind of Purple

Photo: Lene Bjerre

For a slightly muted take on advent purple look to these powdery lilac and pinky-grey shades by Danish brand Lene Bjerre. They go wonderfully well with grey, silver, pewter and black and conjure a softly festive mood...

 Photo: Lene Bjerre

Photo: Lene Bjerre

Lene Bjerre is now offering up to 70% off items in their webshop outlet.

Pepperkaker - Scandinavian Gingerbread

One of the seven varieties of cakes and biscuits which we used to bake when I was growing up was 'pepperkaker'. The Swedes call them 'pepparkakor' and the Danes 'peberkager'. The dough takes a bit of time to make, since it needs to rest for a good 12 hours before one can use it. Children love baking pepperkaker since they can choose from lots of different-shaped cutters and literally bake a story.

We're going to be baking pepperkaker on the 13th, so I've got plenty of time. But it's good to start planning the ingredients now so that we don't rush around looking for them at the last minute.

The recipe we're going to use is one we've tried before, by a Norwegian food writer and blogger called Trine Sandberg.When I was little we often used Henriette Schønberg Erken's classic recipes, but I'm afraid I don't have her cookbook here in England. In any case, Trine Sandberg's cake recipes tend to go down a storm, so we're in safe hands.

Ingredients:
250g caster sugar
1dl golden syrup
1dl dark treacle
1tbsp ground cinnamon
1/2tbsp ground ginger          (Schwartz - available from Asda and Tesco)           
1/4tbsp ground cloves          (Schwartz - available from Asda and Tesco)  
250g lightly salted butter
1tbsp natron                       (use baking soda if you do not have access to a Norwegian grocer..)
2 small eggs
650-800g wheat flour            (NB: Scandinavians do not use self-raising flour, only what I call 'natural' flour)
baking parchment  

NB: 1 dl = 100ml   

• Start by cubing the butter and putting it in a wide bowl. Set aside.
• Pour the sugar, syrup and treacle into a small saucepan and gently heat until the sugar dissolves. 
• Add the ground cinnamon, ginger and clove to the mix and stir well.
• Stir in the natron (or baking soda) with quick movements. The mixture will lighten and rise slightly.
• Without delay, pour the mixture over the butter in the bowl. Stir until the butter is completely melted and the mixture has cooled.
• Whisk the eggs and add them to the main mixture.
• Add the flour by sifting it over the mixture bit by bit and stirring carefully. Continue until you get a smooth and quite firm dough (you may not need to use all the flour - set the rest aside)
• Shape the dough into a smooth flat ball with your hands, return to the bowl and leave it somewhere cold for 12 hours (in England that will have to be the fridge)

  
Baking:
Sprinkle a bit of flour on the table or bench where you will be rolling out the dough. Roll out the dough with a rolling pin (you don't have to do the whole dough in one go, I break it up into smaller lumps and roll those out individually). For small to medium sized cutters I would roll the dough out to ca 3mm thick. If you are making a 'pepperkakehus' (a gingerbread house) you will need to go slightly thicker, 5mm, otherwise the walls and panels of the house will be too fragile to work with.
In my experience it is quite difficult to lift the pepperkake shapes off the worksurface and on to the baking tray, so I suggest that you roll the dough out to around 1cm thick, then transfer it on to a sheet of baking parchment and finish rolling it out to 3mm or 5mm thickness. You can then place the cutters (or your house pattern) on the dough - we call it 'sticking out' the shapes - and lift off the residue from between the cut out shapes, leaving you with pristine cookies that can be put straight in the oven. Bake at 220-225C (no fan), in the middle of the oven, for 7-10 minutes. Keep a close eye on the tray towards the end as they will darken quickly and can burn if you are not careful. Remove from the oven and transfer the whole sheet of baking parchment with the cookies on it to a cooling grid (they will still be soft at this stage, so if you lift them off one by one they may bend).

Keep your pepperkaker in a closed tin until you are ready to serve them.

Decorating:
If you like decorating pepperkaker you can use white icing, by itself, or as glue to stick on little silver balls or coloured sweets. Here is a simple recipe:

• 4dl icing sugar
• 1 small egg white (if it's a medium or large egg increase the amount of icing sugar)
• 1ml lemon juice

Whisk the ingredients in a bowl until smooth, firm and not too gloopy. Scoop into a plastic freezer bag, tie a knot firmly to close the opening and snip a corner of the bag off with a pair of scissors. The snip should make a small hole, to give you a fine piping. (You can of course use a piping bag - but this is really not something I have invested in - I prefer throwing the bag away when I've finished) You can also add food colouring to the piping mix, but do bear in mind that it will make it more runny, so you would have to add a bit more icing sugar to compensate.

Pipe away. If you're decorating a pepperkake house you may find that the icing will run slightly down the walls - in which case set aside your piping bag and reserve it for decorating horizontal stuff. Add a bit more icing sugar to the recipe and you'll find it holds its shape better on vertical surfaces.
The icing will need to dry thoroughly before you can put the cookies away in a tin.

 Photo: Trine Sandberg

If you are making a house you can use the piping to glue the bits together, but the best option is to make caramel and use that - it dries much faster. Arla, the Scandinavian dairy brand, has a fairly simple model drawing which you can print out on A4 paper and then cut out the various elements. See here. With a bit of dedication you could make this:

Photo: Arla

And if you fancy stocking up on beautifully crafted utensils for the baking days ahead, try Iris Hantverk

 Photo: Iris Hantverk

Having not baked pepperkaker for a few years I re-learned a couple of lessons this time: 
- If your spices are a bit old (as our were) you can still use them, but do increase the dosage a bit to get the desired spiced flavour. Our pepperkaker turned out a bit on the bland side...
- I tend to buy large eggs these days, and traditional recipes are generally based on using medium to small eggs, unless large eggs are specifically stated. This makes a big difference when making sugar frosting, as a large egg yields a large egg-white. Opt for a small egg, or increase the amount of icing sugar. Otherwise you might end up with a gloopy glazing, which will look fine on cakes decorated while lying flat but it will droop and run when decorating a pepperkakehus...

Baking in December

Last night I went to bed hoping that the Amazon delivery van wouldn't arrive after I'd fallen asleep. I wanted our new stand mixer for the kitchen to be delivered, but not after 10pm. I woke up this morning and realised that it hadn't been. Grrr.

This is very inconvenient. I have two traditional British Christmas cakes to bake this weekend. And while my husband bakes them by hand, he is not here, and I do not have the arm-power to cream brown sugar and butter in those quantities... Disappointed. Cakes will not be as good if they don't get to snuggle in their cake tins and sip brandy for a month before we serve them to our families.

The elusive stand mixer is also going to help me reconnect with my traditional Norwegian self, specifically the baking of the magical 7 kinds of 'julekaker' in preparation for Christmas. Norwegian Christmas kakes are more like biscuits and small kakes, each a mouthful only. Which 7 varieties one choses to bake is left to your own preference, guided by family tradition and - perhaps crucially these days - preparation time and effort. In my family we never made 'Fattigman', a delicious deep fried diamond-shaped delicacy. My mother wasn't comfortable with the idea of deep frying - hot oil with children jostling around wasn't a reassuring thought, and worse even, our hair would smell of 'smult' afterwards. We concentrated on non-dangerous baking: 'Serinakaker', 'Berlinerkranser', 'Mor Monsen', 'Pepperkaker', mince pies (my father is British, hence the mince pies and Christmas cake), 'Krumkaker', 'Sandkaker'... none of which need to bathe in the deep-frying pan. Each weekend in December was dedicated to baking two types of cakes, which were stored in Christmas-patterned tins until we would crack them open on the 23rd December.

So just come on and deliver that silly mixer! I have work to do.

Counting Down to Christmas

I know it's not even Advent yet, and to be honest I don't really like the fact that all the shops in London have put up their Christmas decorations already. But, when it comes to planning flowers for Christmas one does have to start early. Earlier than this weekend actually, but unfortunately I am not that organised.
This week I received a batch of amaryllis bulbs and small hellebore plants, which I intend to nurture to the best of my abilities in the hope that they will flower for Christmas. 'Hippeastrum Carmen' is a variety that produces rich dark red blooms - as you can see from this photo they are absolutely beautiful

Photo: Anna Linder

I plan to pot 3 bulbs up in a bowl for a central table display (I have no idea which bowl yet so I will have to start them off in something humdrum) and then 3 bulbs planted individually in these smoky green glass pots from H&M Home

The little hellebore plants are a luscious purply red, called 'Helleborus Purpuracens'. I hope to bring these to flower for Christmas, and afterwards I will plant them in the garden where they will bring a welcome shot of colour to the darker corners during the winter.

 

Photo: Gardens4You

I ordered the bulbs and plants from a firm called Gardens4you which posted them to me from The Netherlands. If I had gotten them here in England it could easily have cost a fortune. And yes, I do believe in buying locally, but unfortunately the two florists in our little town do not have the same tastes as I do...