Well, carrying on the theme from my piece for the magazine last month of preparation, I thought I would tell you of my ramblings for this month.

At our recent last YEAST gathering, the welcome part of the meeting was about what meal we would create from the kitchen pantry to entertain some last minutes guests, well as you can imagine this led into some protracted discussion, and we wondered what recipes we would dish up for a “Safari Meal” baring in mind we would have to included yeast at each of the courses, I’m not sure if the subject was left for further discussion or perhaps ‘home-work’, but it got me thinking. So, if you will allow me to have this as my home-work, I will see what seasonal recipes with yeast in I can find for the December magazine.

Well, we are getting to that time of the year, when, if I remember correctly, my Grandmother used to start getting the Christmas cakes for the family ready, it was some what of a production line affair and besides that they needed plenty of time before icing for the required amount of brandy to soak through them.

On one particular year, one of the offerings to come from her kitchen was certainly a surprise, and not for the amount of brandy which went into it. She held onto the secret for a good while, well until Christmas day, when we eventually got the reason out of her. It turned out she had baked two cakes, one for her and one for our family, her cake being the smaller of the two cakes in the oven, she duly tested, with the needle that the centre of her cake was cooked, the test indeed proved it was ready, so out came the two cakes, and left to cool down. Several weeks of dosing with brandy followed.

Grandmother started to make her very own recipe marzipan and when the cakes were ready she started to roll out the marzipan out to cover them, it was then she realised her mistake, the larger of the two cakes was not cooked all the way through, so the ‘stodgy’ mixture was removed from the base of the cake and not wanting to waste anything, the mess was duly turned into a Christmas Pudding.

But she pondered what to do with the cavity which presented her, no problem it was filled to the gunnels with her homemade marzipan mixture, which as we came to find out was the hardest marzipan ever created. The operation continued with the icing and affixing of the snowman, Christmas tree and other ornaments and eventually it was presented to us on our seasonal trip down to Huntley.

I suppose the moral of the story is don’t waste anything; everything has a time and a place, even marzipan, however hard it is.

Watch out next month for my selection of seasonal YEAST based recipes.