Erster Advent

This year I'm not bothering with any of that 'waiting until Christmas to have a mice pie' malarkey. I'm leaning hard into the Advent baking from the get go. 

We have a large jar of mincemeat left over from last year, thankfully unscathed by the hot days of summer (an exploding jar of fermented mincemeat is a horrible thing, and guess I how know that?), so mincemeat recipes seemed the place to start.

I haven't gone full out on the mince pies yet, but rather have become experimental, just a little, with the unvention (I can't be the first, after all) of Mincemeat Chelsea Buns. Yes, they're exactly what you think: Chelsea Buns filled with mincemeat rather than the usual basically-mincemeat-anyway mixture of fruit and spice.

The mincemeat is my go-to recipe: Delia's cranberry mincemeat with the almonds left out and dried cranberries used in place of fresh. And probably some dried sour cherries substituted for some of the cranberries.

The Chelsea bun recipe is my nan's. One of my best kitchen possessions is a 1956 Good Housekeeping Compendium that saw my nan through raising 4 strapping lads and has the stains to prove it. It also has -- joy of joys -- the odd printed recipe card, page torn from a newspaper and handwritten recipe tucked in. So, at the start of the 'Fish cookery' chapter, illustrated by a truly revolting colour plate of prepared trout, is a crinkled and speckled sheet ripped from a notebook with my Nan's best handwriting on it.

Glorious technicolour fish.

Nan's recipe is for old-fashioned yeast cookery like wot we learned at school: take 2oz flour, add yeast and warm milk, leave to froth etc etc. I am simpler in my method and proceeded thusly:

• 8oz flour
• 1/4oz dried yeast (easy bake quick action stuff)
• 1/2 tsp salt
• 1 tsp sugar
• 4floz warm milk
• 1/2oz butter or marg
• 1 egg

Stir yeast, salt, sugar into flour. Warm milk, melt fat into, let it cool a little. Stir milk/fat into flour, also add egg. Adjust wet/dry if needed to get it kneadable. Knead it. This recipe says 'until smooth and elastic', but Nan used to tell me you should knead bread until the dough was 'like a baby's bottom'. Take your pick, I guess. 

Then do all the usual stuff: leave to prove until doubled in size, knock back, roll out, spread with mincemeat, roll up, slice, put in tin, leave to rise again. I cooked them at 180C for 20 mins, then glazed with milk and sugar, and gave another 10 mins (I meant it to be 5, but didn't actually set a timer, so...)

So these are ready to go for weekday snacking:

Needing a bit more advanced preparation are Aachener Printen, a tooth-breakingly hard spiced German biscuit from the Rhineland city of Aachen (aka Aix-la-Chapelle). I developed a taste for them on various German jaunts, and they're not easily obtainable over here.

All the recipes I've found for them seem, frankly, baffling. The dough is left to sit for days in 'a cool room' before rolling out and cutting up. The recipes use potash as a leavening agent. (Apparently I can halve the amount and use bicarb instead.) One of the ingredients is 'sugar beet syrup', which I'm thinking is probably near enough to golden syrup.

These problems could all be solved with a little more reading, I'm sure, but I'm forging ahead with goodwill and a spirit of experimentation. (I did this last year, too, but didn't record what worked, so we're back to square one.) For now, here's my small batch of dough sitting in its cold place. I'll report back next weekend...