Christmas baking

Christmas granola — the perfect homemade gift

Five good reasons to switch up your traditional homemade holiday gifts from cookies to granola.

It couldn’t be simpler to make and your kitchen will smell like orange, cinnamon and toasted nuts and coconut for days.
It’s the perfect gift to go low- to no-waste by buying ingredients in bulk with your own containers, sourcing local like my neighbour’s walnuts, and packaging in use-again Mason jars labelled with easily washed off http://www.wineglasswriter.com Wine Glass Writers.
Granola has a longer shelf-life than cookies and it’s filled with healthy ingredients like nuts, seeds, grains and dried fruit.
It’s amazing as a breakfast cereal or sprinkled on yoghurt.
Invite over a group of friends and make a really really large batch (like 64 quart jars), put on some Christmas tunes and drink a little wine or cider.

Christmas Granola recipe

Ingredients for six cups of granola (just multiply everything for bigger batches)

Four cups quick or old-fashioned, uncooked oats
1/2 cup shredded coconut
1/2 cup chopped pecans, walnuts or hazelnuts or a combination of all three
1 tablespoon wheat bran
1 tablespoon wheat germ
1/4 raw unsalted sunflower seeds
1/4 cup butter, melted
1/2 cup of local honey
2 teaspoons grated orange peel
1 teaspoon vanilla
1/2 teaspoon ground cinnamon
1/4 teaspoon fresh-ground nutmeg
1/4 teaspoon salt
1 1/3 cups dried cranberries

Ingredients for many batches of this recipe and some of the jar decorating supplies.

Easy baking directions

Pre-heat oven to 350 F. (We also used our wood fired oven. If you are lucky enough to have one… fire it up to pizza-baking temperature or very hot, burn down the coals and then remove and cool to about 180 C… basically the temperature you would use to make bread.)

Use your oven or if you have one, granola bakes well in a wood-fired oven.

Mix all the ingredients together except the dried cranberries, (which are added after the granola is toasted) in a large bowl. Spread the granola onto cookie sheets or other suitable baking pans.

Bake for 40 minutes stirring the granola every 10 minutes so it toasts evenly. The granola should be a nice even toasted brown colour when its done.

Cool and then add the dried cranberries and mix.

Decorate your jars

Cut squares of a Christmas fabric to cover your jar lids, tie on some greenery or berries with raffia and label the jars with handy dandy Wine Glass Writers. Christmas scents will hit you as soon as you open the beautiful re-useable containers.

December 6, 2019 2

French buttery, hazelnutty, chocolatey Christmas cookies – Flours de Lin

There is no better combination in French baking than a tender butter cookie made with ground almonds, sandwiched with hazelnut spread and dipped in dark chocolate. These Flours de Lin are relatively easy to make and have become a staple in my Christmas baking. Even if your piping skills aren’t up to scratch they are so tasty it won’t matter.

Cookie Ingredients (makes apex. 20 cookies)

Cake flour – 125 grams (1 cup plus 4 teaspoons)
Room temperature butter – 150 grams (5 1/4 ounces)
Sea salt – 1/8 teaspoon
Granulated sugar – 80 grams (1/3 cup)
Ground almonds – 60 grams (1/2 cup plus 1 tbs)
Egg whites – 30 grams (1 extra-large white less 1 to 2 teaspoons)
Vanilla extract or vanilla bean paste – 5 grams (1 teaspoon)

Directions

Line two sheet pans with parchment paper.

Sift the flour into a bowl and set aside. Place the soft butter with the sea salt and sugar in the bowl of a stand-mixer and mix with the paddle attachment for 1 minute on medium speed. (Note…if your butter isn’t soft these cookies will require Popeye muscles to pipe) Add the almond flour, egg whites and vanilla and mix until incorporated. Add the sifted flour and mix for 30 seconds only on low speed. Do not over-mix as it will spoil the delicacy of the cookies.

Scrape the mixture into a pastry bag fitted with a 3/8 inch star tip. Pipe 1 1/2-inch-long flat teardrop cookies onto the parchment-paper-lined sheet plans, leaving 1/2 space in between them and staggering the rows.

Hold the pastry bag with the tip at a 45-degree angle, close to the sheet pan. Continue to press on the bag and swing the tip toward you while you progressively stop pressing, so that the teardrop ends in a tail.

Let the cookies rest at room temperature for 1 hour. Thirty minutes before baking preheat the oven to 375 F.

Bake the cookies for 15 minutes, until golden brown. Cool completely.

Filling and dipping ingredients

Hazelnut paste (such as Nutella) – 200 grams (2/3 cup)
Good quality dark chocolate – 200 grams (7 ounces)

Assembly directions

Once cool, flip half of the cookies over and pipe a small amount of the hazelnut paste. Top with another cookie and press down lightly to sandwich.

Slowly melt the dark chocolate over a double boiler. Dip the tail of each cookie into the chocolate and place the cooke on parchment paper. Let the chocolate harden and then store the cookies in an airtight container. Do not refrigerate.

(You can substitute the hazelnut paste with a chocolate ganache or raspberry jam if you like.)

December 8, 2017 0

Pulla is a traditional Finnish sweet bread that is flavored with the unique scent of cardamon. Your kitchen, whole house actually, will be filled with the scents of yeasty bread-baking with an amazing cardamon finish. It makes a stunning braided loaf, or can be baked into individual rolls for easy eating. Finnish Pulla is very similar to challah, with its eggs, milk and butter additions but interestingly fragrant with a warmth of spices. It’s fascinating how Scandinavians have the tradition of pulling cardamon, a spice native to India, into their bread baking. It was the Vikings who brought back this spice from their plundering expeditions. How cool is that?

This is my dad’s recipe, scrawled rather cryptically on a hard-to-read recipe card. After some code-breaking and further research, here it is. The recipe originated from a Finnish friend of the family who not only made us Pulla but made it at our house, hence my strong scent-filled memories of this wonderful bread.

Side note about Cardamon

Scandinavians not only use cardamon in their breads, but also in mulled wine, cookies, cakes, pastries and meatballs too. Cardamon, the third most expensive spice after saffron and vanilla beans. My small bottle cost $10.95. It is a part of the ginger family. Indigenous to South India, and according to some accounts to Sri Lanka, Bhutan and Nepal as well, it was brought to Scandinavia by the Vikings, a thousand years ago, from their travels to Turkey. Cardamon appears in written Nordic cookbooks as early as 1300AD.

Side note about Finnish swearing

This recipe makes three braids or if you prefer two larger braids. One I’m bringing to Master’s Swimming this morning to present to a Finnish swimming mate, Jarkko. Every swim practice I google a Finnish word and try it out on my pal. Today’s is “jumalauta” which translates to holy shit, or God help me, a good word to use after a tough kick set. (Jarkko hates kick.)

Ingredients

2 cups milk, heated to 115°
1/2 cup warm water (110 degrees F)
1 cup white sugar
2 tsp ground cardamon
4 eggs, lightly beaten
9 cups flour
1 tsp. kosher salt
1/2 cup melted butter
1 (2.5 tsp) packages active dry yeast
1 egg yolk
Sliced almonds
1 tbsp heavy cream

Directions

Warm the milk in a small saucepan until it bubbles, then remove from heat. Let cool until lukewarm. Dissolve the yeast in the warm water. Stir in the lukewarm milk, sugar, salt, one teaspoon of cardamon, 4 eggs and enough flour to make a batter (about 2 cups of the nine). Beat until the dough is smooth and elastic. Add about 3 more cups of the flour and beat well, the dough should be smooth and glossy in appearance. Add the melted butter and stir well. Beat again until the dough looks glossy. Stir in the remaining four until the dough is stiff.

Turn out the bowl onto a floured surface, cover with an inverted mixing bowl and let rest for 15 minutes. Knead the dough until smooth and satiny… at least 10 to 12 minutes.

Transfer dough to a greased bowl and cover with plastic wrap; let sit until doubled in size, about 1 hour.

Punch down dough; cover again with plastic wrap and let sit until fully risen, 30 minutes.

Who needs a proofing drawer when you have a warm spot in front of the fire.

Heat oven to 400°. Transfer dough to a work surface and divide into 3 equal pieces. Set 2 pieces aside and divide other piece into 3 equal portions. Roll each portion between your palms and work surface to create a 16-inch rope. Pinch the three strands together and braid ropes together to form a loaf.

Transfer loaf to a parchment paper–lined baking sheet. Repeat with second and third dough pieces. Cover loaves with plastic wrap and let sit until slightly puffed up, about 20 minutes.