Recipes: Mum's Christmas Fruit Cake

i keep one christmas cake for the following thanksgiving ... slowly steeping in its' fruit and alcohol for an entire year. we opened the tin yesterday to a wonder - almost a pudding ... lovely crumb, beautiful texture and taste and aroma. we passed it around for the first quarter of an hour simply sniffing! :O) now I notice, dear readers, that I have left the recipe at home!! then tomorrow for the recipe. my mum always got the cake much denser, almost black ... llike the plum pudding ... but sadly she is gone and taken the secret with her into the clouds. poka! katrin

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fruit must be soaked a month in advance. you can add to it.
for two small (8 inch) cakes i use 2 kg of mixed fruit.
this is left in a sealed container to soak in molasses, brandy, rum, brown sugar, cloves, cinnamon, nutmeg and orange juice - with just a splash of balsamic vinegar. :O) fruit and nuts are candied orange and lime peel, dried dates, apricots, prunes, half walnuts, half almonds. this is my own taste, so you could simply use one type of nut and one type of dried fruit as you will. i have made the cake simply with dried dates and almonds as well.

the cake pans are lined in brown paper which keeps the cake from sticking or burning and also means you can store the cakes in this paper wrapping for the length of time until you eat them. the cake batter is topped with a round of brown paper before it goes into the oven.

I do not use a bain marie in the oven to bake the cakes, though i used to. Oven temperature is 120 degrees celcius convection oven. Cakes are baked for 2 hours - until the toothpick is clean.

Ingrediants for cake:
4 cups sifted flour with 2 tsp baking powder.
12 eggs, 400 gram sugar, 400 gram butter.
beat together butter and sugar, add eggs one at a time, add wet mixture to dry.
then fold in fruit mixture to cake batter.
split between your two cake tins.

you can make the entire batter into one cake. cooking time would then increase to 3 - 3,5 hours depending on your type of oven.

when cool, place in tin and seal with tape until christmas, or next christmas, or next christmas ...

merry christmas! :O) katrin

wintersalon09 in vienna

Chocolate by Warren Laine-Naida, Photographed by Anastasia Abramova. Salon by Sylvie Proidl. Vienna. Eat at Treszenewskis Buffet. Wear Dorothy Strange. Tear out your heart and cover it in marzipan. The coffee’s to die for and don’t forget to bring back some chocolate …

Ms Abramova is a dear friend of mine. Her big green Russian eyes have captured hundreds of delicious moments, not only in her present home of Vienna. Hoping to see a coffee table edition of her photos in stores soon? I've been trying to convince 'Nastya of that for some time now. The photos are as beautiful and alluring as the photographer.

her facebook album(s):
http://www.facebook.com/album.php?aid=2031541&id=210100598&ref=mf

Falling Asleep at the Wheel ...

sometimes I wonder if this really happened or if I read it somewhere ...

55 euro later I have a badge and an info package. Boy are these euro notes funny looking. A bit big too. Like play money. Weird. ‘Jessie Watkins, Marlies’ is printed on my name tag which I wear on a red white and blue lanyard around my neck. Cool. I walk to the conference room and take a seat in the half full room near the front. Katrin walks on stage right on time and everyone applauds. She’s exactly like her picture. Middle aged, stout but not fat – firm – commanding, but gentle, taller than I had expected with shoulder length dark blond hair held up with a clasp – she’s wearing jeans and running shoes, a white polo shirt and a small set of pearls. Her hair is up and her glasses sit on the edge of her nose. I laugh a bit to myself. She looks as if I had taken Maya and stretched her another foot. Katrin is introduced, and the title of her talk, ‘Taking the Bite out of Social Networking’ appears behind her on a large wall screen. “Good morning. My name is Katrin Lawson, I’m currently living in Germany where I work for a large food service company – which I won’t name as they aren’t paying for the spot - I’m a chef, a mum, and my blog, when I have time to write it, is Dandelion Jam.” There is a brief moment of laughter from the audience and from Katrin herself as she looks at her notes, “If you find yourself in the wrong talk, you now have the chance to leave, I believe there’s a talk on chocolate sculpting going on next door … ” She smiles and there’s more polite laughter. She turns around and looks at the screen behind her as the title changes to a slowly animated selection of restaurant images. “I’d like to talk today about social media and how it affects your audience, the millions of middle class foodies and cooks who enjoy the food we prepare for them in our various businesses around the globe every day. As if that weren’t a daunting enough task as it is, internet blogs and food channels are making them even more demanding, expectant, and knowledgeable than they already are. So, what does this mean for us? What the heck is social marketing to your average restaurant owner? How does the internet take the old addage, ‘One happy customer tells two friends but one unhappy customer tells ten friends’, and with a simple mouse click changes ten friends to three hundred friends on foodbuzz, or twitter, or facebook? …” Katrin’s voice continues as the slides behind her change and I look around the room’s hundred odd faces. Until know I hadn’t thought that there were obviously other people around the globe reading Katrin, that it wasn’t just me. Funny. I had taken her words and imagined they were for me alone. I smile to myself and lean back to listen.

... :O) kisses, katrin

Close to the Maddening Crowd - in the Algarve, Portugal

Dear Readers - this a bit late hitting my blog but I wanted to share it with you!

Next time I’m looking for a bottle of HP sauce I’m going to simply fly to Portugal because the store shelves are just sagging with the stuff. What a shock! Biscuits, Quality Street chocolates, anything that wouldn’t be out of place on any High Street in London. Portugal is sadly not far from the maddening crowd. Fortunately for us however our hotel (Hotel Casabela) was in Ferragudo and not in Portimao. Ferragudo is a small village with a beautiful beach and fishing village while Portimao is like Atlantic City populated by drunk Brits FORTUNATELY seperated by a wide estuary which you must drive around. Even though I’m dying for a full English Breakfast I know that my stomach would be dragging in the sand at the end of the week unless I pay close attention to what I put away so it’s fish and salad most of the way. The salads are amazing and you really must try one because they are almost exclusively a sort of greenish red beefsteak tomatoe, very large and thickly cut with onions and balsamic vinegar and then there is a lot of garlic. The fish you can get cheaper anywhere BUT in Portugal - funny that because they’re scooping them out of the ocean at the edge of our table and whacking them over the heads before our eyes but there you go eh? a warning: do be careful of the plates of prawns and other delicacies they place on the table while you're deciding what to order because these are NOT free. It's just like when you’re in Paris when after dinner you notice a few extra bucks at the end of your bill because of the table cloth or in Germany because you ate a pretzel from the basket which you thought was ... bread? Same thing as the plates of lovely fried fish in Portugal. But I digress - right well, just pump that up a notch and you have the Algarve. If you’re not sure don’t eat it okay? We made especially sure we didn’t crack any of the packets of sardine paste not just because it was absolutely disgusting I am sure but you are going to get nailed for each cachet of butter you open. So you’ve been warned! :O)

The fish was REALLY good and so was the the sun setting behind the guy at the grill and the kids tootling by on their electric scooters adding extra charm. Even the girls ate without complaint. If you aren’t sure, then order the King Fish with the huge eyes. Start with some prawns sauteed in garlic and don’t forget the salad. Wine. Forget what you heard about the scary Algarve wines fondly know to the locals as “Dog Throttler”. No matter how hard we tried we only found wine from the north of Portugal on offer and they were all very good. The whites especially from around Porto where light and tasty.

So I’m wondering, what’s with all this we hear that the world’s ocean levels are rising each year? What about the water carved 10 story high cliffs I’m seeing here on the Atlantic coast? Where did all that water go then? If it’s rising on the east coast of the US it must be because the world’s tilting and all the water from the west coast of Europe is getting sucked away. Wasn’t the water level then once much much higher? Where did all the water go? Hell, the grand canyon was full of water once. And WHO are these people who bring inflatable wading pools to the beach!?

ola! :O) katrin