Happy New Year + The Last Bit of Christmas

So here we are at the start of another year: a clean slate with a full twelve months ahead of us. My resolution this year is simply to make the most of it. 

Personally 2013 was a good year, but it was a year in which I saw the lives of too many dear friends turned up-side-down with challenges beyond comprehension - from losing loved ones to diagnoses that didn't belong with good young healthy friends. Lets hope that 2014 is a calmer year that offers hope and healing. If 2013 taught me anything, it is that you should never ever take life for granted, however mundane it might sometimes seem and to stop occasionally and take time to appreciate the good things, no matter how small.

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Christmas is now just a blur of happy times with family and friends. It was good, but it came and went too quickly. I had planned to do many posts on this blog in the run up to Christmas, but the frantic flurry of last minute wrapping, baking and organising left me no time. However, I still want to share this belated Christmas recipe with you for Mulled Wine & Cranberry Cake. I made double the recipe so that I could have two cakes. I baked one in a round 6" tin and the other in a regular loaf tin. I gave one to my eighty-something neighbour - to say that he appreciates a homemade cake is an understatement. I take round baked goods to him every Christmas (and Easter too), wrapped in cellophane and tied with a ribbon and a few days later the most beautifully poetic handwritten thank you note drops through my door, which upon reading shows just how the giving of a home-baked cake can mean so much to some people. I love that. 

The second cake, is nestling in the back of my freezer: the last bit of Christmas if you like. It never ended up having its moment during the festivities, but it will no doubt brighten up a dull January afternoon some day soon. If you happen to have any mulled wine leftover, this recipe is for you.

Wishing you all a Happy and Healthy New Year full of Happy Days. xxxxx

Mulled Wine & Cranberry Cake

Make 1.

200ml mulled wine

75g ready-to-eat dried figs

50g crystallised stem ginger

75g whole blanched almonds

50g each dried cranberries and dried sour cherries

100g light muscovado sugar

2 large eggs, lightly beaten

Grated zest of 2 oranges

100g fresh cranberries

225g self-raising flour

1 tsp ground cinnamon

½ tsp ground allspice

For the topping:

75g dried cranberries (or sour cherries)

2 tbsp orange juice

4 tbsp red currant jelly

Chop the figs, ginger and almonds and mix with the dried cranberries and cherries and the sugar in a bowl. Pour the mulled wine over the fruit and leave to soak for 30 mins.

Preheat the oven to 160℃, 325℉, gas 3. Stir the eggs, orange zest and the fresh cranberries into the soaked dried fruit. Next, sift the flour, cinnamon and allspice. Mix together. 

Spoon the mixture into a 19 x 9cm, 7cm deep loaf tin or a 6" round tin, base-lined with baking parchment. Bake for 55 mins. Leave to cool, tip the cake out and peel off the paper.

To make the topping, heat the cranberries, orange juice and red currant jelly over a low heat, stirring until the jelly has dissolved.

Brush the top of the loaf with some of the topping juice, then spoon the cranberries along the centre of the cake (for the loaf shaped cake), or the centre (for the round cake). Leave to cool before serving.

Recipe adapted from Family Baking by Sarah Randell

Photography: Buttercup Days

A New Year + Distance

So here we are in a new year: 2013. The decorations come down tomorrow and all traces of Christmas will be gone, packed away in the loft for another year. It was a good Christmas with lots of time spent relaxing with family and good friends; all the day-to-day stuff that dominates the other fifty weeks of the year firmly pushed to the back of the mind.

In our home the start of January is never dull as we have a very important birthday in the house (David's: today), it seems to just gate-crash itself into the tail end of Christmas and therefore extend the kid's excitement somewhat. They both have an effortless ability to get more enthusiastic about our birthdays than we do ourselves.

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However, the new year hasn't been rosy everywhere. Someone I'm very close to lost her father on New Years Eve. It was unforeseen, cruel and shattering and I can't begin to understand the emotions that she must be experiencing at this time. There's roughly 350 miles between us. I want to be there. To do what, I don't know. I just want to take round a cooked meal for an evening that ends a tough day. I want to take her little girl, who has lost her granddad, out for a milkshake or an ice cream on the windy beach (I'm certain she'd have no problem eating ice cream in January). Just lots of little nothings. How I wish that distance wasn't so great.

First Day Of A New Year

Well, here we are in 2012; it's sounds so futuristic. How was your New Year's Eve? Ours was very low key. Before kids we would have found ourselves at some party or another; nowadays it's a case of trying to stay awake until midnight so to have a glass of 'something' to see in the new year. I'm not complaining though; I don't feel I'm missing out on anything other than feeling groggy the next day. 

With young children, feeling below par isn't an option. This morning we woke bleary eyed to Lily and Arthur bounding into our bedroom announcing that they were about to perform a puppet show for us from the foot of our bed. That wouldn't have been quite so endearing after a heavy night.

We had a leisurely breakfast of warm corrisants and then decided to take in some sea air, so we put on our boots and coats. It then started to rain so we took off our boots and coats and settled the kids down at the kitchen table to do some of the craft presents that they'd received over Christmas. Arthur lost himself in his new Play-Doh Train whilst I helped Lily assemble her cardboard dolly. We drank tea and listened to the radio.

Now it's a nap for Arthur, a film for Lily, the newspaper for David and I will settle on the sofa to pick up my two and-a-half year old cross-stitch. One of my new years resolutions is to stop starting so many craft projects and start finishing some off. I can't remember such a relaxing day at home. We know only too well that our hectic pace of life will be resumed before the week is out, so we're making the most of just 'being' at home as the four of us.

Happy New Year.