Preparing for the festive season

Christmas-time is my baking highlight of the year. I stress the word "baking" because savoury dishes such as turkey and ham don't really come into the equation, although I do enjoy planning the main meal as well. I love baking Christmas treats: gingerbread, panforte, panettone, lebkuchen, shortbread, mince tarts, Christmas cake ... the list is long.

It's time to load up my shopping trolley with bags of dried and glace fruit, different types of nuts, spices such as ginger, cinnamon and mixed spice, and plenty of flour, sugar, butter and eggs. The kitchen fills with the heady, mouth-watering aroma of cakes and biscuits as they cook - a spicy smell that I always associate with Christmas and its delicious traditional dishes.

There are many cliches associated with Christmas and it can be a difficult time of year for people who feel forced to try and live up to the ideal of "festive cheer". But I'm fortunate in that Christmas was always a fun and social time of the year for my family. With relatives spread around the state, it was a good chance for everyone to get together and indulge themselves with good food.

The Christmassy treats that we served up for morning and afternoon tea were just as much a part of our celebrations as the turkey, ham and plum pudding. Everyone had a specialty and we eagerly looked forward to the chance to savour delicacies only available at that time of year.

I love learning about the different traditional dishes and adding them to my repertoire. To my Anglo traditions of shortbread and mince tarts, made to my grandmother's recipes, I've added a decadent chocolate panforte and my auntie's lebkuchen biscuits. Other dishes I've tried included buche de Noel (France), stollen (Germany) and panpepato (Italy).

But each year the list grows longer, as I find more books and recipes to add to the pile. Murdoch Books has recently released Cooking for Christmas, a sumptuously photographed book that has recipes for soups, entrees such as potted prawns, main dishes with all the trimmings, puddings and edible gifts. I'm trying to resist buying another cookbook but there are some excellent recipes in there...

I have the delicious magazine Christmas special from last year, to which I've added a Women's Weekly version that I bought last week. I'm eagerly awaiting the December issues of delicious, Gourmet Traveller and Donna Hay Magazine to find out what goodies are on offer this year, and I've been busily combing through past issues of Donna Hay Magazine to gain inspiration.

What dishes will make it onto my baking list this year? Chocolate and Grand Marnier buche de Noel from Gourmet Traveller? Stefano de Pieri's panettone? Gourmet Traveller's recipe for panpepato? Or old favourites, such as my chocolate panforte or a panforte that matches perfectly with Rutherglen muscat? It's time to write out the shopping list and fire up the oven ...

Going dotty

Certain things are guaranteed to always catch the eye of children, particularly if it involves lollies or bright colours. Smartie-studded biscuits, cute little iced gingerbread men and sugary honey-joys are a magnet for my son Daniel's eyes.

I believe that moderation is the key to eating well and I have no problem with the occasional treat of a cake or biscuit. However, I very rarely buy them. Sometimes it's because the promise never seems to live up to the taste (many cafe cakes are disappointingly dry) but it's mostly because I prefer home-made because I know exactly what is going into it and there's no hidden preservatives or additives.

So these sweet little vanilla-scented buttery biscuits are perfect. Budding little cooks will enjoy helping mix up the dough and will most of all love to decorate the biscuit with brightly coloured smarties. Quick to mix, quick to cook, a creative outlet in designing patterns on the biscuits ... this is a lovely little project that has kept Daniel amused many times. Best of all, these are certainly a lot cheaper to make than the cafe versions, which often sell for $2.50 each.

Dotty biscuits

125g butter, softened

125g caster sugar

1 egg

1/2 teaspoon vanilla extract

125g plain flour

125g SR flour

1 cup (250g) smarties

Preheat oven to 180 degrees. Line a baking tray with baking paper.

Cream butter and caster sugar together until light and fluffy. Add egg and vanilla and mix in.

Sift the flours together and fold into the butter mixture with a wooden spoon to form a soft dough. Turn out onto a sheet of non-stick baking paper, cover with another sheet and roll out to about 5mm thick. Cut out circles with a biscuit cutter (I used a 6cm diameter), place on the lined baking tray and press smarties into the biscuits.

Bake in the oven in batches for 10-15 minutes or until golden. Cool on a wire rack.

Book review: Cravat-a-licious

Many Australians have recently discovered food writer Matt Preston through his role on Masterchef and suddenly Matt and his cravats are everywhere.

But veteran Epicure readers such as myself have known and loved Matt and his witty restaurant reviews and food articles for nearly a decade.

It would be easy to dismiss this collection of articles (billed as "selected works") as a quick publishing response to cash in on Masterchef's fame. But the writing in Cravat-a-licious easily stands on its own merits. Preston's incisive and witty columns feature in Epicure, delicious magazine and Vogue Entertaining & Travel, among others.

The book is divided into five parts: Eat, Cook, Revere, Travel and MasterChef. The Eat section ranges from humorous essays on "25 things you should never do in the kitchen" to more thoughtful articles on migrant food and refugee catering (both of these essays contributed to Preston winning the World's Best Food Journalist in 2008 at the Le Cordon Bleu World Food Media Awards).

In Cook, we follow Preston on his searches for the perfect tomato sauce, perfect risotto, perfect ice-cream and perfect home-cooked slice. All interesting forays through the history of the dish, and recipes are included.

Revere features profiles of well-known chefs, including Margaret Fulton and Skye Gyngell, while Travel looks at different world cuisines. A few essays on the MasterChef phenomenon wrap up the book.

The best thing about this collection is that the articles haven't dated. Even those that are nearly a decade old still sparkle with freshness and vigour. I've read most of these articles before (the articles and recipes on slices, biscuits, ice-cream and risotto still reside in my bulging recipe files) but I enjoyed re-reading them again. "How to win a ribbon" (a 2001 article about how to win a ribbon in the cookery sections at country shows) and "Preserving knowledge" (on how to make jam, published in 2007, and then followed up again earlier this year) are my favourites from this collection, perhaps because they tackle subjects close to my heart (keeping the art of home baking alive).

Preston writes as you imagine he would speak and his unabashed love of food and life shine through his writing. Experienced cooks and foodies will enjoy Preston's masterful knowledge and excellent writing, while novices will find plenty to help broaden their own knowledge. Highly recommended.

Party time!

I wanted to show photos of platters filled with tasty morsels of food but, sadly, the guests gobbled them up before there was time to organise the camera. So here are the remnants of our feast, a lonely plate of leftover savouries: caramelised onion tarts, potato and fetta pastries, and corn and ham mini-muffins.

The potato pastries were served by my colleague Susie at a work morning tea recently. They were rapturously received and we requested the recipe from Susie. She happily provided it, although she said that the dish was really too simple to require a defined recipe. She's right; you can mould the basic ingredients to fit your own requirements. Best of all, the pastries can be baked the night before and refreshed in a hot oven for a few minutes before serving.

Susie's potato pastries

I haven't given defined amounts for these pastries, as you can adjust the amounts to suit the number of servings you want to make. Each pastry sheet made about nine squares. For the party, I used four sheets of pastry and about three large potatoes.

The beauty of this recipe is that you can tailor the ingredients to suit yourself: perhaps substituting goats' cheese for fetta, or adding a sprinkling of finely chopped prosciutto.

potatoes (ones that are good for cooking)

marinated fetta (I used South Cape marinated fetta, which is absolutely delicious, as the cheese is marinated in herbed oil

sheets of ready-rolled puff pastry
sprigs of rosemary, finely chopped

sea salt and black pepper

Preheat oven to 200 degrees Celsius. Set out the puff pastry sheets to defrost.

Peel the potatoes and slice into thin slices. Bring a saucepan of salted water to the boil and cook the slices until just tender (about five minutes or less), then drain.

Lay a sheet of pastry on a lightly floured bench (to stop it sticking). Place slices of potato across the sheet (I got about nine slices to a sheet, but you could get more or less, depending on how big your potato slices are. You want a little border around each slice.)

Top the potato slice with some crumbled fetta, chopped rosemary, a sprinkle of sea salt and some grindings of black pepper. Pop into the oven and cook until the pastry is puffed and golden (about 20 minutes). Remove and cool on a wire rack.

Pastry pinwheels

These pinwheels came about because I had two sheets of puff pastry left over from the potato pastries. This must be the simplest snack ever and disappeared quickly, with the adults clamouring for them as much as the children!

I used pesto and parmesan for the adult versions, and promite and cheddar for the children's version but the adults loved the promite version just as much, so I would suggest making a mixture of both to serve.

Again, adjust the quantities to suit the number of servings you want.

sheets of ready-rolled puff pastry

home-made or store-bought pesto

Promite or Vegemite spread

parmesan and cheddar cheese

Spread pesto over a puff pastry sheet and sprinkle over finely grated parmesan. Roll up like a sausage and slice into 1-cm pinwheels. Repeat using Promite and finely grated cheddar.

Place pinwheels on a baking tray lined with non-stick baking paper and bake at 200 degrees Celsius for about 20 minutes, or until pinwheels are puffed and golden.

Happy birthday! Part 2

Shiny wrapping paper lies shredded on the floor and the helium is slowly leaking from the balloons but there is no post-party flatness. Family and friends gathered to help us celebrate Emily's first birthday and the party euphoria and sugar high lingers.

Hosting a party, particularly at home, brings a whole host of administrative issues on top of the catering. Cleaning, dusting, putting precious objects out of reach of 15 stampeding toddlers, sorting out toys into boxes for different age groups, sweeping the back deck, setting up outdoor furniture, arranging the pot-plants, buying the balloons and streamers ... the list is endless. But an inveterate list-maker like myself finds it satisfying ticking off each item.

Also satisfying, and much more fun, is planning the party menu. With up to 50 people coming, we can't just throw together a few platters and hope that will be enough. Luckily there are good cooks on both sides of the family and all are drafted in to help fill the white platters that are marching out of the cupboards, eager to be used. Of course we have bowls of chips and lollies to put out, but there's also pastry pinwheels, club sandwiches, potato and fetta pastries, corn and ham mini-muffins, caramelised onion tartlets and smartie biscuits.

I'll share some recipes in a future post. In the meantime, here is the fairy toadstool birthday cake that I made for the party.

Happy birthday! Part 1

Today my baby girl Emily turns one. It's the common lament of most parents but it really is true: where has the time gone? This past year has really flown by and she is growing up so quickly.

We are having a proper party to celebrate on the weekend, and I've already planned the birthday cake from The Australian Women's Weekly birthday cake book. But for our little family dinner tonight I made a sweet little marble cake, all swirls of multi-coloured cake butter, topped with rose-pink icing and silver cachous.

The marble cake is very easy to make (although it does use a few bowls) and can be whipped up in surprisingly quick time. It is a basic butter cake mix that is coloured with cocoa and pink food colouring. It makes a lovely afternoon tea cake but is also nice for a little birthday celebration, particularly for a gorgeous little girl.

Marble cake

This is not a huge cake, so I make it in a loaf tin, which makes a good-sized bar cake. However, you could double the mixture and make it in a square or round cake tin (you may need to adjust the cooking time to suit).

50g butter, softened
115g caster sugar
1 egg
1 teaspoon vanilla extract
250g self-raising flour
125ml milk
2 tablespoons cocoa
1/4 teaspoon bicarb soda
1 tablespoon milk, extra
few drops of rose-pink food colouring

Pre-heat the oven to 180 degrees (160 degrees fan-forced). Grease and line a loaf tin (it usually measures about 10cm x 24cm).

Cream the butter and sugar together with an electric mixer until light and fluffy. Gently beat in the egg and the vanilla extract. Sift the flour and mix in alternately with the milk. Divide the mixture into three bowls. Beat the sifted cocoa and bicarb soda and the milk into one bowl. Add a few drops of rose-pink food colouring (a little goes a long way but you do want this to have a strong colour) into the second bowl. Leave the third bowl plain.

Drop spoonfuls of mixture into the prepared cake tin. When finished, use a skewer to swirl through the mixture. Bake for 40-45 minutes (you may need to cover the top with foil if the top is browning too quickly) or until a skewer inserted into the cake comes out clean.

Cool in the tin for about five minutes and then turn out onto a wire rack to cool completely.

When cold, ice with a basic butter icing (beat 25g softened butter, 125g sifted icing sugar and a few teaspoons of boiling water until smooth. Add a few drops of rose-pink food colouring, mix to a smooth consistency and ice) and decorate with silver cachous or sprinkles.

Sojourn in Sydney

After Melbourne's cold start to spring (winter coats and flannelette sheets still a necessity), Sydney's balmy sunshine acts like a tonic. Layers are shed and upper arms exposed. Colourful spring outfits beckon from shops along Oxford St, Paddington, and credit cards are just begging to be used.

The occasion is a girls' weekend in Sydney and several girlfriends and I have flown up from Melbourne to spend time with some friends who are now Sydney-based. First stop is a fortifying sandwich at a little streetside cafe on Oxford St, where I spy a piccolo latte for $3 on the coffee menu. I first heard the term "piccolo latte" two weeks ago when a colleague from my Sydney office mentioned it was his drink of choice. Suddenly I'm seeing the term everywhere (although I've yet to order one; it sounds similar to a macchiato. Can anyone offer me more information?)

Letting six women loose along Oxford St makes for an interesting few hours (one person is heard to mutter something about "herding cats") but we manage to loosely stay together and not do too much damage to the credit cards. We freshen up at home and then it's time for cocktails at Blue Sydney at The Wharf at Woolloomooloo. The dark-toned bar is cavernous, with strategically placed low tables, comfortable couches and screens, and old hardware from the days when it was a working wharf is still visible. The cocktail menu is extensive and makes a choice difficult, so we settle for a mixture of sangria, champagne and mojitos. When the bill arrives, we also make the acquaintance of the $12 "service charge", which is applied for "table service" (although this seems a misnomer to me, as customers are steered gently but firmly to tables and I did not see a general bar where drinkers could prop). Perhaps, like the $50 main, this is a Sydney trend that is yet to filter down to Melbourne?

Dinner is at The Pier Restaurant in Rose Bay. It is a delightful setting, with a long, narrow dining room boxed with glass windows on both sides, offering beautiful views over the Harbour. Everyone chooses plump Coffin Bay oysters for entree, which are perfectly sublime with a squeeze of lemon juice. Yellowfin tuna, barramundi and John Dory and some of the options for mains. Most of the table opts for roasted barramundi, although yellowfin tuna also gets a vote. The barramundi's crispy skin contrasts nicely with the soft flesh and is complemented by sweet roasted carrots. Side dishes of salad and divinely creamy mash are wonderful accompaniments.

Although I'm normally a sweet tooth, the four options on the dessert menu leave me cold, especially at $28 per dessert. We order another bottle of Dixons Creek chardonnay and continue our reminiscing about the direction our lives have taken since we graduated from university. We take it in turns to ask the table a question (about joys, achievements and regrets). One question makes everyone think hard. What single possession would you choose to save from your house? Husbands and children are ruled out, as they are not possessions, and it is assumed that you are wearing precious engagement and wedding rings and don't need to save them. To stop everyone from giving the same answer, photos are also deemed inadmissible.

After thinking hard, my choice is my collection of cookbooks and recipe clippings collected over nearly 20 years. It would actually be very difficult to save all of these from a burning house (I would probably need a trailer or trolley to do so!) but, hey, it was a theoretical question. Some of my favourite books, such as The Cook's Companion by Stephanie Alexander and recent titles by Maggie Beer, Gordon Ramsay, Frank Camorra, Bill Granger, Donna Hay, Jamie Oliver and Belinda Jeffrey are all still in print and available, so they could be left behind. But what about my precious scrapbook of recipes clipped from The Age's Epicure section since the early 1990s? Irreplaceable. Epicure once ran a "My Favourite Chocolate Cake" section and I diligently clipped each recipe and snapped up the book version, 50 Fabulous Chocolate Cakes when it was published by Anne O'Donovan in 1995. I can still picture myself in the bookstore in Rathdowne St buying the book, which came with a Gabriel Gate desserts book as a bonus (Not all the chocolate cakes that featured in the newspaper made it to the book, so it was worth my diligence!)

Other cookbooks to go into the save pile are a mixture of the sentimental and the no-longer-available: the metricated version of The Margaret Fulton Cookbook (the first cookbook I was given when I left home); The Cookery The Australian Way (third edition) (which I used in my year eight home economics class); my hand-written recipe book that was a Christmas present in early high school (only my absolutely favourite recipes were ever transcribed in here, but perhaps I would prefer to forget that the first risotto recipe I was given used long-grain rice!); Margaret Fulton's Book of Chocolate Cooking (picked up for $2 from an op shop in the late 1980s and the recipes and photography have stood the test of time); Irish Soups & Breads and the Kilkenny Cookbook (both mementoes from a trip to Ireland a few years ago), the RuffArtz little black book of coffee and cake (an absolute treasure trove of good old-fashioned cakes and slices from country cooks, collected to raise royalties for a small volunteer arts organisation in Ruffy in north-eastern Victoria); my mum's original copy of The Women's Weekly Birthday Cake Book (it contains some of my favourite childhood birthday cakes, which did not make it into the updated edition that I have); and my personally autographed copy of Jill Dupleix's Old Food.

Just like my old friends, these books have stood the test of time and have so much more meaning to me than just a collection of ingredients and methods. As I look at the books, I recall where I bought them, why I bought them and what I made from them. I don't know why some cookbooks occupy a more precious place in our lives than others but I like to think that sometimes it's the memories, as much as the recipes, that is the special glue that bonds me to these cookbooks.