Stir up Sunday

Stir up Sunday - Wikipedia tells me that the name comes from the collect in the Book of Common Prayer which is read on the last Sunday before advent, I associate it with The Archers where I first heard the term in relation to baking. It’s also the traditional day to make Christmas pudding and mincemeat, and if it doesn’t need a long time to mature it’s also a good day to make your Christmas cake.

Coincidentally I did make my first Christmas cake yesterday, but only discovered the synchronicity with the dates afterwards, it’s going in my diary for next year (just so I know). If the cake is good it’ll become a fixture and I have to admit that it’s really going to test my patience waiting another 5 weeks to see if it’s any good. I have an inkling that it will be acceptable because the top got a bit crispy and I decided to slice it off and in the process I tried a little bit. The recipe used was the Dan Lepard I’ve been sitting on for the last year and if nothing else it’s made my flat smell amazing.

I didn’t make the cake in my new toy – I wanted a bigger bowl and it’s not a recipe that calls for much mixing bar the folding in of the fruit and – well it just seemed more appropriate to do it by hand. However the Scottish one has been encouraging me to use the Kitchen Aid (part of me still thinks I should have waited but it was a part easy to ignore) and so I thought perhaps I should. So I did and made another Lepard cake – Hazelnut and Prune – there’s a link to it on the Christmas cake page. It’s pretty good but calls for quite a lot of nutmeg which I will halve next time because currently I feel it tastes a bit virtuous and a little unbalanced; which is as much a reflection on my heavy handedness as anything else – I may have erred on the side of excess.

The hazelnut and prune effort went through the mixer which was extremely satisfying, so satisfying that I felt I had to bake something else and so opted for the Gugelhupf recipe in ‘Tanta Hertha’s Viennese Kitchen’. It’s turned out well but I’m not sure it’s for me (hard to tell at the moment because I burnt my mouth on a very hot piece of lamb stew and everything tastes a bit off). This version doesn’t use alcohol which might add a bit of richness – instead its lemon and almond based and perhaps a bit subtle for someone geared up to Lebkuchen and heavier fruit cakes. I’ll keep eating it until I’m sure. I could probably have carried on baking all night but perhaps fortunately ran out of ingredients. I love my new Kitchen aid.

Lebkuchen

Monday afternoon off and I’ve spent a fair chunk of it finishing off yesterdays baking. More Lebkuchen which have managed to find an appreciative audience (and I’ve still got quite a lot of dough left, the promise that it would make 40 seems to have been a bit conservative but I’m not complaining). I got a new electric whisk on the way home and fresh yeast as well so I could have another go at the current buns. They rose this time – erupted might be a better description, I turned my back for a few minutes and the whole lot came damn near to escaping.

The buns are now out of the oven and have had a vote of confidence from both myself and the Scottish one – still annoyed about yesterdays rubbish results, and having walked into John Lewis as they unpacked the Kitchen Aid of my dreams (a rather fetching dark blue) I’m somewhat underwhelmed with the new whisk (not a fetching blue colour) but at least I feel like I’ve regained control of my kitchen which is something.

I liked the Lebkuchen so much that I’m giving a slightly amended version of the recipe (tailored to what I had in the cupboard) in ‘Tante Hertha’s Viennese Kitchen’:

250g runny honey

125g golden caster sugar

1tsp ground cloves

3tbsp ground cinnamon

80g unsalted butter

90g of dried apricots

150g of mixed nuts – I used mostly hazelnuts with some almonds as the original recipe suggested but imagine walnuts would be nice too.

2 large eggs + another egg to glaze the biscuits

500g plain flour

1tsp bicarbonate of soda dissolved in a tbsp of water.

Mix the honey and sugar in a pan and bring to a gentle boil stirring until the sugar is melted, add the spices and set aside to cool a little.

Melt the butter.

Whizz the fruit and nuts in a blender until they’re at bread crumb consistency and add the flour.

Beat the two eggs until frothy and then mix all the wet ingredients with the dry. It’s a stiff mixture, I started with a wooden spoon and ended up kneading it altogether with my hands which worked much better. Flatten into a manageable slab, wrap in clingfilm and chill in the fridge for a good few hours.

When the dough is good and cold and hard heat the oven to 160°C/ gas 3, roll it out to about half a centimetre thick, and glaze the biscuits with beaten egg before they go in the oven. They will be done in about 20 – 25 minutes, are wonderful, and will apparently keep for about a month in an air tight container (some chance).  

Tante Hertha’s Viennese Kitchen – Monica Meehan and Maria Von Baich

Tante Hertha’s Viennese Kitchen was left just outside my door yesterday morning. (Postman doing a pretty good milk tray man impression at the moment – love the postman who will climb the stairs to my flat, so much nicer than the postman who left a little red note in the letterbox telling me I could have my post in 48 hours if I would go and fetch it myself from a skanky back alley behind the railway station). Sadly I had to go to work almost immediately and didn’t get home until just before 11pm desperate for a bath, bed and sleep. At 3am I was still leafing through Tante Hertha.

A few years ago I was beguiled by the Tessa Kiros books which sort of mixed family history and food. ‘Falling Cloudberries’ is an excellent book which deserved all the plaudits it got, ‘Apples for Jam’ has a good chocolate cake recipe in it and then there was ‘Venezia: Food and Dreams’, the pages are gilt edged, the bookmark is black velvet, the illustrations are lavish and I’ve never used it once not least because I find it impossible to engage with however lovely it is to look at.‘Tante Hertha’s Viennese Kitchen’ is just as lovely but infinitely more engaging, an object lesson in how to do this sort of book properly. 

Hertha was the aunt and great aunt of the daughter mother team responsible for this book. She was a nurse during the First World War after which she became a society photographer. The Second World War and communism robbed Hertha’s family of estates in what was to become Slovenia (like all the best Austrians Hertha was a baroness) and the photography business went downhill. Nothing daunted Hertha (who didn’t marry but shared an elegant apartment with her mother and a sister in law) went into catering working from a kitchen which was also a bathroom. She sounds like the most amazing woman.

Hertha kept a notebook of her recipes which were almost lost in a clear out but were happily rescued by Maria Von Baich and this book is the result. I gather that everything has been tested and where necessary tweaked and updated, the book is a nice bit of biography, background on old Vienna, photo’s which create an ambience, lots of notes and tips, and a really good selection of recipes. The emphasis is on sweet things; cakes, biscuits, and tortes but the savouries aren’t neglected and for someone who doesn’t really know it looks and feels very authentic. The sweet bias makes sense because what I do know about fin de siècle food is that the savoury bits don’t always date so well but everyone loves cake.

Reading this I was also really reminded of ‘The Hare With Amber Eyes’ – the parallels are obvious; an aristocratic family falling on hard times, the Viennese setting, and a concentration on the small details of everyday life, as well of course as a treasure rescued and passed down the family. Better though is that this treasure can be shared – these recipes are living history and a celebration of a remarkable woman. At the weekend (after I’ve caught up with some sleep) I will be making Lebkuchen which I love to buy but have inexplicably never made – and am not even sure if I have another recipe for. There are all manner of other biscuits I want to try, and the thing that’s really caught my imagination; meringues to use as Christmas tree decorations, apparently these were traditional and are baked with cotton attached for hanging purposes. I haven’t bothered with a tree for the last two years but think I might have to this year just so I can do this.

‘Tante Hertha’s Viennese Kitchen’ is published by a company called New Holland which is new to me but coincidentally amazon recommended ‘Notes From A Swedish Kitchen’ this evening which comes from the same stable. It looks intriguing and has gone on my wish list (who would have imagined that I've been looking for just such a book – damn you amazon with your temptations). If it’s anything like as good as Tante Hertha it will be impossible to resist.