Island Cooking for Christmas on the Continent

As a child I enjoyed watching and helping my mother with the Christmas cooking preparations. The cake was made a few weeks in advance. This practice was utilised in order to "feed" the cake, which meant making holes in the cooked rich fruit mixture with a darning needle and pouring as many tablespoons of brandy as the cake would handle without leaking. This was done once a week for four to six weeks. After being fed in this manner the cake would last a VERY long time (and bring more Christmas cheer, too). As I grew up in a teetotal family I had no idea why we needed the cake to be made so early if we were not going to lace it with brandy. That is until I grew up and started making Christmas cakes of my own... Even if you don't feed the cake it tastes much better when it has had time to mature and plenty of time is needed for the marzipan icing to dry (so the almond oil doesn't leak through the next layer, the Royal icing). Then in our house my mother indulged one of my sisters who did not like Christmas cake by building a hill on top of the cake out of marzipan, down which a little model of Santa would be travelling through the Royal icing "snow". My sister got to eat the marzipan mountain in place of a piece of cake.

If you happen to live on the Continent and want to make your own Christmas Cake then there are a couple of things you need to bear in mind. Where I live on the Continent you cannot buy currants for love nor money (in fact there's very little here you can buy for love... I've tried :-) ). For those not in the know, currants are very small, sweet raisins made from a particular grape that grows on just one Greek Island. I guess that so few are produced that the market cannot expand further than the British Isles and I don't know why we got to have them - perhaps something to do with the British colonial past? Anyway. If you try replacing currants with an equal weight of more raisins (Christmas cake contains three different dried vine fruit - currants, sultanas and raisins) you do end up with a different, more voluminous cake... So it seems that size is important, but bigger is not necessarily better - at least in this case. Despite the lack of currants and the slightly odd consistency of my cake, it was fed long enough to be palatable to my family visiting this year... Afterall, I did feed it with the very best brandy (it was the only one we had in the bar!). Most of my family is no longer teetotal, hence the need for a well-fed cake.

Glycerine is another essential Christmas ingredient for the Christmas cake from the islands that cannot be bought in the average supermarket where I live. When I asked my gym buddy where I might be able to buy some, he wondered what on earth I was up to. When I cut the cake this Christmas and the icing shattered, sending shards of hard icing all over the floor my stepmother told me I had not put enough glycerine in it. I told her that she was right as there was none available and therefore none included. So I finally discovered what it's for: to keep the icing soft enough to be cut, yet hard enough to retain its snow-like texture. So when you happen to visit home sometime before Christmas, make sure you pick up some currants and some glycerine.

Another ingredient you may need is suet. Suet is yet another thing you don't find easily here on the Continent. Suet is the grated fat from around a cow's kidneys (yuck, I hear you say). It is essential for making mincemeat for mince pies (you cannot buy ready-made mincement here, either) and for making Christmas Pudding. It is so essential, in fact, that in the UK you can buy vegetarian suet, which I would normally use (as I am a vegetarian). Presumably it is made from the grated fat found around the kidneys of a carrot or other root vegetable... When making my own mincemeat I had to resort to baking margarine, but it worked very well, in fact. My boyfriend declared that my homemade mincement tasted just like "shop-bought". There was no higher compliment when I was a young man!

Despite missing some vital ingredients, Christmas pudding, cake and mince pies were all gratefully received, and indeed feted. My partner and I have gained a reputation for making everything from scratch when entertaining guests and it takes a lot of work to maintain the high standard. As we were nine for Christmas here this year, all from the islands, I was very pleased that everything went down so well. So if you're having family from the islands for Christmas next year, take my advice and buy your ingredients from the homeland to generate that authentic Christmas flavour.