Back to the old routine

Yesterday I spent down at church in the kitchen, cooking yet again. I had lots of broccoli that I had bought in Asda at 20p each and almost a kilo of stilton that I had bought on super special offer so I made 54 x 350ml portions of broccoli and stilton soup. I wanted to get it made while the broccoli was still fresh enough. I don't normally make that flavour of soup because it is just too expensive. I do love it though and brought home the pot scrapings to have as my lunch today. Yum!

I also baked three lots of cake to go in the freezer which was just about bare. Too many Christmas shoppers calling in to have a cuppa and to recoup their energy for the next round of shopping. I shall be back in the kitchen on Monday as usual to try and get that freezer stocked a bit fuller. The coffee shop is closed for a week between Christmas and New Year so there are no customers at the moment to eat everything I am making. The staff are doing a deep clean of everywhere while they have the opportunity. I have been looking on the internet looking for a few recipes to broaden my menu. I have my regular basics but I am looking for a few more recipes that are not complicated to make but look and taste good and are inexpensive to boot. As a charity, we don't aim to make a profit but we do need a small surplus as our chairs are about ten years old and are suddenly starting to look it, as furniture often does. Last year the chairs were all looking fine but this year they have needed to be mended frequently and there are cracks starting to appear on the seat pads. so we need a little bit of profit to buy new chairs with. If anyone has a favourite recipe that would be useful to me at the coffee shop, then please do share it : )

Happy Christmas

Happy Christmas to everybody!

We spent yesterday with our family so there were 19 of us. It was a lovely day and I have very good memories but I am enjoying today with just my husband and me. and we had leftovers from yesterday's dinner that we just needed to zap in the microwave - lovely!

Christmas cake

I made a Christmas cake for church a couple of weeks ago and have marzipanned and iced it. I used Delia Smith's rich fruit cake recipe. She gives the quantities for various sizes of cake, both round and square, which is very useful. I put a couple of tablespoons of juice in the bowl with the fruit and left it to soak. for me at home, I would have used alcohol but we have a No Alcohol policy at church. I wanted the fruit to have a little soak but I was obviously too impatient and used the fruit too soon,  because the cake took four hours longer to cook than the recipe said. Four hours! My nice husband had come down to help me wash up and clear up and get some baking in the freezer (not the Christmas cake!) and he was not amused at waiting there for an extra four hours. Nor was I, come to that. In the end, the cake turned out very well and I am very pleased with it. So are the customers because they keep buying slices of it.

And no, I am not making a Christmas cake for us. I do very little, if any, baking for us. For one thing, we eat it if I make it and we both could do with a smaller waistline and secondly, I am all baked out at church : )

Delia's rich fruit cake recipe can be found at:

http://www.deliaonline.com/how-to-cook/baking/scaling-up-cake-recipes.html                                                                     

It is December now

Well it is December now and five minutes ago I was saying that it was almost December and now Christmas is nearly here. I've been to one grandchild's school concert and we are going to another tomorrow. I missed one on Friday when I was in school all day invigilating. I spent most of last week in school again and felt like the red queen in Alice in Wonderland who had to run just to stay in the same spot. To progress, she had to run even faster. I only had a short morning to bake at church for the coffee shop. And guess what?  All those Christmas shoppers came in for a cuppa and went and ate all the cake I had made and all the cake I had stashed in the freezer. And I did not really have time to go down and make more. So I went down early for the church service on Thursday evening and got some traybakes in the oven and then nipped out to the kitchen halfway through the service to take them out of the oven. After the service we stayed to ice them and finish them off. We left at 10.45 so we got to sleep really late and I had to be up shortly after six. It takes several early nights to make up for lost sleep these days, I find. And tomorrow I am back baking again because they ate all the cake on Friday and Saturday that I had made on Thursday. It looks like I am going to have to put in a bit of overtime in the kitchen after Christmas to get a little bit of stock in the freezer...