Postcards from Christmas
Happy New Year to all my wonderful readers . . .
Here are a few “postcards” on Christmas-related topics.
Crisis at Christmas - For years, I have muttered under my breath that helping out at a soup kitchen over the Christmas period would be a good way of balancing out all the excesses of our annual consumer-fest. It’s not that I don’t like Christmas. . . . but there does appear to be a bit of a puritan streak in me which finds the idea of every person in the UK spending an average of £700[*] in a supposed celebration of the birth of someone that most of us don’t even believe in, vaguely nauseating.
My problem is that all I ever do is feel faintly guilty about the indulging but find excuses to avoid doing anything about it. This year, I have been well and truly trumped. My sister – who has never demonstrated any signs of remorse over eating too much turkey and Christmas pudding - announced that she was going to “do Crisis at Christmas”.
She found it to be a truly worthwhile experience. I’ll be writing about what Crisis at Christmas actually does, and what she learned from it shortly.
John Lewis’s Father Christmas letters – When I was a child, we wrote letters to Father Christmas to tell him what we wanted and then set them alight and watched them go up the chimney. As Father Christmas came down the chimney to deliver the presents, I suppose there was a simple kind of logic in this arrangement (I assume my parents must have made sure that they got a quick look at the contents of the letters before they were consigned to the flames).
This year, in line with the consumer emphasis of Christmas, Mr Darnbrough and I got the children to write their letters and then Mummy put them both in an envelope and they were posted into a letterbox by the toy department of John Lewis in Reading. About a week later, two rather special looking letters arrived. We got two completely different letters, from the North Pole, thanking the boys for writing and telling them how Father Christmas’s preparations were going. The children were very pleased. The parents were ecstatic! It was as though we’d actually had letters from the man himself! We’ll definitely be doing that again next year.
Christmas cake testing (1) - Home-made For the past six years or so we have relied on Delia’s Complete Cookery Course for our Christmas cake recipe. I have occasionally been tempted to stray but the power of the familiar is just too great. I also love the fact that Delia, who always strikes me as a rather strict mistress of the kitchen, is very firm regarding the addition of large amounts of brandy to Christmas cakes. We follow her instructions diligently and have always been well rewarded.
This year, just when I’d weighed out all the fruit, I discovered that we’d run out of brandy! After ransacking the drinks cupboard, Mr Darnbrough produced a bottle of Russian brandy that he’d bought in St Petersburg over fifteen years ago. We opened it carefully: for some reason I was worried it might explode. We sniffed it and decided to take the risk. The fruit was duly soaked, the cake made and the result duly “fed” with Russian brandy every week or so. At some point I had a bit of a wobble over the advisability of using this unknown spirit, so I did actually try some. As I’m not a brandy drinker, all I can say is that it didn’t taste like vodka, so I assumed it would be OK. The cake was a great success.
Christmas cake testing (2) - M&S You may be wondering why, if I made my own cake, I should be needing to buy anyone else’s. The reason is that Mr Darnbrough is adamant that “our” Christmas cake cannot be opened until Christmas Day. This means that I have to (note the imperative) buy another Christmas cake to eat in the run-up to Christmas.
We generally opt for an M&S Celebration fruitcake as our pre-christmas Christmas cake. We had them at our wedding, at both the children’s Blessings and we have them in the run-up to Christmas too. They are rich, moist and they have a good thickness of marzipan and icing. They also get my vote for reliability. We’ve been buying them for eight years now and we’ve never been disappointed.
Because we have never sufficiently tired of Christmas cake by the time our own cake is finished, we usually buy one more from “somewhere else”. This is just in case there is anything better out there.
Christmas cake testing (3) - Duchy Originals The reason we bought the Duchy Originals cake is that it was reduced to half-price in Waitrose and I do find it difficult to resist a bargain . . . but if I’d spent the full £16 on that cake I’d have been wanting my money back.
One of the things that really annoys me about packaging is when it appears to have been designed to give you a completely false impression of the size of the item it contains. Cosmetics companies are prime culprits in this respect. It would appear that Duchy Originals has been following their example.
The closed box (no tacky cellophane windows here for the vulgar to peek through) looked big and inviting. I picked it up and it felt substantial. The cake weighed 900g. To my greedy mind, that sounded big enough but I was seriously disappointed when I took it out of its box. It looked rather small and weedy, sitting slightly off-centre on a thick, gold foil-covered cake board.
Never mind, we thought. It’s organic, and it’s top of the line. The proof will be in the eating. Well, it wasn’t. It was rather dry and rather sugary and when I looked at the ingredients list I was rather surprised to see that 40% of the total cake was the icing and the marzipan and there wasn’t much brandy in it, either. We won’t be buying one of those again, even if they drop the price to a fiver.
[*] Which? survey, 28 December 2006. www.which.com.
Happy New Year to all my wonderful readers . . .
Here are a few “postcards” on Christmas-related topics.
Crisis at Christmas - For years, I have muttered under my breath that helping out at a soup kitchen over the Christmas period would be a good way of balancing out all the excesses of our annual consumer-fest. It’s not that I don’t like Christmas. . . . but there does appear to be a bit of a puritan streak in me which finds the idea of every person in the UK spending an average of £700[*] in a supposed celebration of the birth of someone that most of us don’t even believe in, vaguely nauseating.
My problem is that all I ever do is feel faintly guilty about the indulging but find excuses to avoid doing anything about it. This year, I have been well and truly trumped. My sister – who has never demonstrated any signs of remorse over eating too much turkey and Christmas pudding - announced that she was going to “do Crisis at Christmas”.
She found it to be a truly worthwhile experience. I’ll be writing about what Crisis at Christmas actually does, and what she learned from it shortly.
John Lewis’s Father Christmas letters – When I was a child, we wrote letters to Father Christmas to tell him what we wanted and then set them alight and watched them go up the chimney. As Father Christmas came down the chimney to deliver the presents, I suppose there was a simple kind of logic in this arrangement (I assume my parents must have made sure that they got a quick look at the contents of the letters before they were consigned to the flames).
This year, in line with the consumer emphasis of Christmas, Mr Darnbrough and I got the children to write their letters and then Mummy put them both in an envelope and they were posted into a letterbox by the toy department of John Lewis in Reading. About a week later, two rather special looking letters arrived. We got two completely different letters, from the North Pole, thanking the boys for writing and telling them how Father Christmas’s preparations were going. The children were very pleased. The parents were ecstatic! It was as though we’d actually had letters from the man himself! We’ll definitely be doing that again next year.
Christmas cake testing (1) - Home-made For the past six years or so we have relied on Delia’s Complete Cookery Course for our Christmas cake recipe. I have occasionally been tempted to stray but the power of the familiar is just too great. I also love the fact that Delia, who always strikes me as a rather strict mistress of the kitchen, is very firm regarding the addition of large amounts of brandy to Christmas cakes. We follow her instructions diligently and have always been well rewarded.
This year, just when I’d weighed out all the fruit, I discovered that we’d run out of brandy! After ransacking the drinks cupboard, Mr Darnbrough produced a bottle of Russian brandy that he’d bought in St Petersburg over fifteen years ago. We opened it carefully: for some reason I was worried it might explode. We sniffed it and decided to take the risk. The fruit was duly soaked, the cake made and the result duly “fed” with Russian brandy every week or so. At some point I had a bit of a wobble over the advisability of using this unknown spirit, so I did actually try some. As I’m not a brandy drinker, all I can say is that it didn’t taste like vodka, so I assumed it would be OK. The cake was a great success.
Christmas cake testing (2) - M&S You may be wondering why, if I made my own cake, I should be needing to buy anyone else’s. The reason is that Mr Darnbrough is adamant that “our” Christmas cake cannot be opened until Christmas Day. This means that I have to (note the imperative) buy another Christmas cake to eat in the run-up to Christmas.
We generally opt for an M&S Celebration fruitcake as our pre-christmas Christmas cake. We had them at our wedding, at both the children’s Blessings and we have them in the run-up to Christmas too. They are rich, moist and they have a good thickness of marzipan and icing. They also get my vote for reliability. We’ve been buying them for eight years now and we’ve never been disappointed.
Because we have never sufficiently tired of Christmas cake by the time our own cake is finished, we usually buy one more from “somewhere else”. This is just in case there is anything better out there.
Christmas cake testing (3) - Duchy Originals The reason we bought the Duchy Originals cake is that it was reduced to half-price in Waitrose and I do find it difficult to resist a bargain . . . but if I’d spent the full £16 on that cake I’d have been wanting my money back.
One of the things that really annoys me about packaging is when it appears to have been designed to give you a completely false impression of the size of the item it contains. Cosmetics companies are prime culprits in this respect. It would appear that Duchy Originals has been following their example.
The closed box (no tacky cellophane windows here for the vulgar to peek through) looked big and inviting. I picked it up and it felt substantial. The cake weighed 900g. To my greedy mind, that sounded big enough but I was seriously disappointed when I took it out of its box. It looked rather small and weedy, sitting slightly off-centre on a thick, gold foil-covered cake board.
Never mind, we thought. It’s organic, and it’s top of the line. The proof will be in the eating. Well, it wasn’t. It was rather dry and rather sugary and when I looked at the ingredients list I was rather surprised to see that 40% of the total cake was the icing and the marzipan and there wasn’t much brandy in it, either. We won’t be buying one of those again, even if they drop the price to a fiver.
[*] Which? survey, 28 December 2006. www.which.com.
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