white chocolate cranberry shortbread

I usually bake shortbread for Christmas. It is something I used to do for Christmas with mum. When I was younger we had a sheltie named Ariel who had a passion for shortbread – he used to get terribly excited when we put the pounds of butter on the counter to warm before making it at Christmas. (He also loved raisins and had to have a few before bedtime.) And I’ve been through other shortbread traditions as well. When I lived in Montreal, my friend Leslie and I would make huge numbers of shortbread cookies one day every December when we both lived there – bells, santas, holly, stars, angels and dinosaurs. This year I’ve done two versions – a cheater version which was I baked up a bunch I had in the freezer that I bought for a fund raising event (frozen cookies that you bake) – the other based on a friend of a friend’s recipe that I got a sample of at work. These are really cookie bars and easy to make. The first batch I made is almost gone so I will have to do another batch this week.


White chocolate cranberry shortbread
1 1/2 c flour
1/2 c corn starch
1/2 tsp salt
1 c butter
3/4 c icing sugar
1 tsp vanilla
1/2 c dried canberries, chopped
1/2 c white chocolate chips
icing sugar for dusting (optional)

Preheat your oven to 300 degrees. Line a 9 x 13 baking pan with parchment paper so that the paper overhangs the ends.

In a large bowl, combine flour with corn starch and salt. In a separate bowl, beat the butter with the icing sugar and vanilla until very creamy. Stir in the flour mixture, cranberries and chocolate chips. Pat evenly into the baking pan, using floured fingers or a spoon. Prick the surface all over, using a fork (Note – I couldn’t do this with my batch – it was too flaky but the shortbread still worked)

Bake in at 300 deg F for 40 - 50 minutes or until golden around edges. Leave to cool in the pan on a wire rack for 30 minutes before lifting out of the pan. Slice into bars while still warm. Dust with icing sugar (optional).

christmas reading

Recently I ordered and received some books from Scholastic. A few are tucked away for T's presents for both Christmas and birthday but a couple were ordered with Christmas reading in mind and T and I have both been enchanted by a couple of my choices.

Merry Christmas, Splat by Rob Scotton is a funny and sweet tale of Splat the Cat and his family. The drawings are so cute and the story has something for both child and parent and I think this is destined to be a classic in our house.

 Splat wants a really big present for Christmas but gets a bit worried about if he's been a good enough cat to get a visit from Santa. So to be extra sure, Splat decides to help his mom get ready for Christmas.

 If you have a small child in your life this will be a story to enchant.

Another one from Scholastic is The Mitten by Jan Brett, based on a Ukrainian folktale. A boy, his Baba, a lost mitten, a forest full of animals all weave a tale of fun.

T loves it.

And I picked up a book I remember reading many moons ago, How Far to Bethlehem by Nora Lofts. A novel about Mary and Joseph and the birth of Jesus. I remember when I was hugely pregnant the Christmas before T was born, feeling empathy for Mary, travelling from Nazareth to Bethlehem on a donkey while in the late stages of pregnancy. This novel takes the bible story and tells it from the perspective of the humans involved. It's all a part of my effort to remove the crazy commercial stress and rush from Christmas and replace it with homemade gifts and family traditions and some of the wonder of a child's Christmas and the joy and peace that is supposed to represent the spirit of the season.

a "transformer" tree

Last Christmas, T got his very own tree from his Auntie K. It's a little artificial tree that folds up and lives in a high corner of the garage. D got it down the other night and I started pulling down the branches while T watched. "Cool" he said, "a transformer tree!"

Last year I hung candy canes, paper chains and a popcorn garland on it - this year I hung a hand ornament T made in preschool

another preschool ornament (a balloon covered with wool and glitter)

and a couple of candy canes and for the rest I was inspired by this post over at makegrowgather.com. We have glitter snowball elves or santas hanging on most of our doorknobs so I thought a smaller version would be great on a tree. And I was right. T's tree is all about homemade charm and I think these are charming. Of course, our house is now covered in bits of wool and felt - T ran around with the small balls of leftover wool I was using to make the pompoms. I'm also making candy canes out of some pipe cleaners and later T and I will go down to the dollar store and find some toy cars or trucks to string up as well. 

 (an aligator as requested by T!)

green soup

I had to laugh yesterday - the woman behind me in the grocery checkout line made a comment about how healthy my groceries looked as she sheepishly put a giant box of delicious looking cinnamon buns on the conveyor. I told her she was just seeing the produce part of my order - the not so healthy stuff was already bagged. Also, I bought the biggest bunch of chard I've seen at this store, it was easily 10 times the size of the rest of the bunches (and I did check that it wasn't many bunches stuck together). Which brings me to the green soup. We've been eating our fair amount of green lately - mainly broccoli - but I had lots of spinach and a bunch of kale sitting in the veggie drawer the other night and after a heavyish chinese food lunch I needed some green so I made green soup. It was inspired by this.

 Here's how I made it:

Green Soup (inspired by Ree)

1 bunch of spinach

1 bunch of kale, cut into ribbons

Saute the spinach and kale in a saute pan until wilted. Set aside.

1/4 c butter

1/4 c flour

3 1/3 c stock (chicken or vegetable, I used a mix)

2/3 c milk

2 tsp dijon mustard

1/8 tsp dry mustard

pinch of nutmeg

1/2 cup finely grated gruyere cheese plus more for the table

splash of cream

In the saute pan, melt the butter. Add the flour, milk, stock, mustards and whisk well to mix. Heat until bubbles form and then simmer for 5 minutes. Season with salt and pepper and a grating of nutmeg.

Add back the spinach and kale and blend into the soup using an immersion blender until the texture is what you like. Add some of the cheese and a splash of cream and stir until blended.

Serve with a pinch of the cheese.

fudge - second try

So this week has been fudge week. It's a family tradition that has lapsed for years, but when we were little, every Christmas my grammie would send us fudge. I remember two kinds, maple and chocolate, and they were called "chicken livers" in our house, as they were usually sent in recycled chicken liver containers. Or maybe they were only one year but the name stuck. Guests were usually taken aback when offered "chicken livers" on the sweets tray - until we would explain, usually all of us at once...Sadly, since Gram died, there has been no fudge at Christmas so this year I thought maybe I could revive the tradition. I tried maple fudge first - I read the recipe and thought - how hard can this be? Seriously, I should know better. I mixed up the ingredients and while stirring I read the words, soft ball stage or 236 deg F. Hmmm I thought. I don't think I have a candy thermometer (I do it turns out) so when I got to the part where I didn't have to stir constantly, I ran to my Joy of Cooking and flipped to the fudge page. A glass of cold water and some strands of the syrup later and I thought I had got to soft ball stage. But you can guess what happened.

The fudge didn't set and there was no way it was going to slice. So in the meantime I had found my candy thermometer so I thought - well I heat it up again. I did and it went hard this time - concrete rock hard. So now I have a big bag of maple fudge crumbles to mix into vanilla ice cream and to crumble into fruit crisps for a maple sugar zing. Sigh. Ok - then I found this recipe which lead me here and here and today I tried again. Of course, I tweaked - a bit - I added a bit of chocolate hazelnut spread to the recipe to make up for the tiny bit of condensed milk that was missing from the can (used elsewhere) as I didn't have another can in the cupboard and I didn't have enough eggs to make chocolate sugar cookies (sorry - that was my logic!). Anyway - the whole not really cooking it worked (I mean you do have to heat it over water to melt the chocolate and I sometimes find that a bit tricky). So well, that when I turned it out and was cutting and packaging it, there was an attack of the dinosaur puppets who all wanted a piece of fudge.

Chocolate Fudge with hint of hazelnut (adapted from Giada de Laurentis)

1 can condensed milk (less 1/3 c)
1/3 c chocolate hazelnut spread
1 lb bittersweet chocolate chips
1 tsp vanilla
3 tbsp salted butter, sliced into 1/2" pieces

Butter an 8x8 baking pan and line with parchment paper so that the paper overhangs 2 sides.

Into a stainless steel mixing bowl, add the milk, hazelnut spread and vanilla and place over a pot of simmering water. Add the chocolate and butter and stir until melted (~ 5-8 minutes). The mixture will be thick and glossy. Pour into the prepared pan and spread evenly. Refrigerate for at least 2 hours to set. Cut into 1" pieces and store in an airtight container or freeze.

sweet potato and carrot soup with chard

As with most supper inspiration around here, a lot of ideas combined with what was in the cupboard to provide this recipe. I bought a lovely loaf of kalamata olive and rosemary bread the other day and decided it needed a really good soup to go with. I had sweet potatoes and carrots and using a recipe for butternut squash soup from here as inspiration, I made soup.

Sweet Potato and Carrot Soup with Chard (inspired by butternut squash soup from America's Test Kitchen Cookbook)

1 tbsp butter
1 medium onion, diced
2 sweet potatoes (~ 2 lbs), peeled and diced
6 large organic carrots, peeled and cut into chunks
5 c chicken stock
2 tsp ground cumin
1/4 c cream
salt and pepper
1 tsp (or more) thai sweet chili sauce
1 bunch swiss chard, stems removed, sliced into ribbons

 In a large saucepan, melt the butter and add the onion. Cook for about 5 minutes until tender. Add the sweet potato, carrot, stock, and cumin and bring to a boil. Simmer, covered for 20-25 minutes or until the vegetables are fork tender.

Puree using an immersion blender (I left a few chunks of carrot and potato for texture), adding more stock or water if the soup is too thick for you. Add in the cream, season with salt and pepper and the thai chili sauce. Add in the chard ribbons, cover and heat for a few minutes, until the chard is wilted. Serve.

baking day

The Advent calendar is up and T's been adding ornaments in chunks instead of 1 per day and now I have carols to serenade me on my way to and from work. And with other blogs full of cookie recipes and delicious descriptions of christmas baking, yesterday I got out my baking sheets. I must admit I was partly motivated by a promise I had to fulfill - at a recent church fund raiser, a kind soul paid for 3 months of my baking (3 batches of something - muffins, a cake, a loaf of bread, etc) and she opted for two types of christmas cookies for 2 of the months. I made 2 batches each of pfeffernuse and almond butter cookies, so one batch to give as my promise and 1 batch for us.

The pfeffernuse remind me of my childhood years in Germany (my dad was stationed in Germany for a few years) but the recipe comes from my Canadian Living Cookbook (Random House/Madison Press) - which has a huge section on christmas baking (and also has the recipe I use as the basis for my fruitcake). These are easy (start to finish ~ 1 hour) and the batch can easily be doubled or tripled for a large number of cookies.

Pfeffernuse (from the Canadian Living Cookbook)
1/3 c molasses
1/3 c butter
1 egg, beaten
1 3/4 c flour
1/2 tsp baking soda
1 tsp each cinnamon and ginger
1/4 tsp each cloves, black pepper and nutmeg

In a saucepan, heat the butter and molasses until the butter melts.

 Take off the heat and cool. Add in the beaten egg. Mix the flour, soda and spices together and add into the molasses mixture.

Blend well, first with a spoon and then with your hands. Form the dough into 1" balls and drop onto an ungreased cookie sheet.

Bake for 10 minutes at 375 deg F. Dust with icing or granulated sugar while still warm.

After our boy played soccer and we ran some errands, including the purchase of a door wreath from a craft market, I made almond cookies. I can't share the recipe because it isn't mine but a blend of butter, sugar, almond extract, eggs, salt, flour and ground almonds morphs into a lovely buttery bite of nutty goodness. I'm glad I made 2 batches, T and D love them.