Christmas Gift #2- Rosemary Shortbread

This is one of my savoury gifts in the Christmas hampers but in fact they have some sweetness from agave nectar and icing sugar. Rosemary must be one of my best-loved herbs (possibly even my number one) and coupled with me having a sweet tooth these turned out to be my favourite things in the gift. Now, "shortbread" might be a bit misleading- these turned out as soft, melt in the mouth biscuits rather than hard and crumbly but in my mind their texture was perfect! With the amount of butter and sugar in these they can't be very good for you but well worth it for a treat- and you can always treat yourself at Christmas.

The recipe I used can be found here from epicurious. I substituted the butter for vegan margarine and the honey for agave nectar. For those in the UK confectioner's sugar is icing sugar (that's what I used anyway!)

Enjoy!

Christmas Gift #1- Chocolate & Walnut Biscotti

For a lot of my family I am never sure what to buy them for Christmas- they seem to have everything they need and I always think my gifts will be wasted. This is why I have taken to making them food baskets as gifts (you may have seen a couple of posts from last year). This year I chose to do two sweet things and two savoury. The sweet things were Chocolate and Walnut Biscotti and 2 flavours of fudge and the savoury things were Rosemary Shortbread and "Cheesy" oatcakes. I have to say this has been my favourite gift basket I have done so far and I have had some really good feedback. Over the next few days I will be posting the recipes and pictures.

Today let's start with the biscotti. I did almond and cranberry biscotti last year and they were everyone's favourite thing in the present so I decided to do another biscotti this year but I wanted to do a completed different flavour. I perused my recipe books and the internet for hours looking for flavour inspiration. As we have just had a baby and so don't have quite as much money as usual to spend on ingredients I had to be a bit careful of what I chose- there were some wonderful sounding recipes but for the quantity I was making, the ingredients would have cost a fortune. Then I came across this recipe. The picture of them looked fantastic and I loved how instead of just being cocoa for the chocolate, there were also dark chocolate pieces inside and the biscotti was also flavoured with a little bit of coffee and cinnamon. This recipe isn't actually vegan due to the eggs and butter but I used an egg replacer and vegan margarine in place of these. I also didn't glaze them with anything before cooking- they really didn't need it. I trialled all my recipes a week before making them for the gifts to make sure I liked them and to see if any adjustments needed to be made. When I tasted these I was a little disappointed that the cinnamon didn't come through very well and I couldn't  taste the coffee at all. I decided to take out the coffee and double the cinnamon and when I tried them again they were perfect.

From the picture in the recipe it showed the biscotti with drizzles of white icing on. I really wanted to carry on the chocolate theme and didn't have any white chocolate to hand to make a contrasting icing so instead I did a dark chocolate one from this recipe (subbing the butter for vegan margarine instead). I tried to pipe the icing on a little like in the picture but I didn't have a thin enough piping insert so instead I coated one side in the icing. It didn't look quite as impressive (thinner piping bag insert is now on my shopping list for next time) but it took these biscotti to another level in taste! With a little creativity and time (four recipes in one day with a baby was very hectic!) I am sure these could have been made more pretty even without piping.

These biscotti are not difficult to make and really impressive as a vegan gift or as after dinner biscuits with coffee. I have had lots of compliments on these and many have asked for the recipe- so here it is!

**I either can't find my photos of these or I completely forgot to take them. Check out the images in the recipe though as they look very similar to how mine turned out minus the icing. Sorry!**

My Christmas Gifts

I have actually been doing a lot of cooking lately even though I haven't posted. The food was for Christmas presents so I didn't want people to find out what they were. Everything has been opened now so this is what I made: mince pies with a cinnamon and orange pastry, almond and cranberry biscotti and festive jam and for those preferring savoury some olive and roasted pepper tapenade and chilli vodka. They were meant to be "hampers" but I couldn't find good baskets to put them in so I wrapped them up in clear tuppaware boxes to keep some things fresh or just wrapped the jars or bottles.

I will start with the easiest first. I found this "recipe" from many sources- chop 2 red chillies and leave in a bottle of vodka for around 5 hours (I left it overnight). This was strained and decanted into two 500ml glass bottles (we used two small empty wine bottles). Before they were wrapped I put a whole chilli in as a decoration.

The orange and cinnamon pastry I adapted slightly from a recipe on allrecipes.co.uk:

225g plain flour
4 tablespoons icing sugar
2 teaspoons ground cinnamon
150g vegan margarine
2 tablespoons orange zest

Beat all the ingredients together into a dough. Hands work best (especially boyfriends' hands if you don't like getting your hands messy like me!)


We did have to add more flour and icing sugar to make it less sticky (quite a lot but I couldn't quantify it). I would also recommend a little more zest and cinnamon as it was quite a subtle taste and I would have preferred more. This makes around 18 pies.


For our mince meat we adapted a recipe from delia online. This makes at least four times what you need for the quantity of pastry listed but it can be stored in sterilised jars for a while:


225g chopped and cored Bramely apples
110g vegetarian suet
around 500g mixed dried fruit (raisins, sultanas, currants, mixed peel)
175g soft brown sugar
zest and juice of an orange
zest and juice of a lemon
25g flaked almonds
2 teaspoons allspice
1/4 teaspoon cinnamon
1/4 teaspoon nutmeg
a good few slugs of brandy


Mix all of the ingredients except the brandy together and sit for as long as possible (up to 12 hours but we only had time for 3). Add the brandy and cook in a low 120 degrees celcius oven for 3 hours with a loose covering of foil.
Once the pastry has been rolled and put into greased cupcake tins then a spoon of the mixture can be put in each one followed with a pastry lid. These can look particularly good in festive shapes like stars. Brush with some soya milk and put into a 200 degrees oven until light golden brown (around 15- 20 mins). Dust with icing sugar to serve.

The almond and cranberry biscotti was my favourite thing we made. This was adapted from a recipe from food.com.:

3 cups flour
1 tablespoon baking powder
1/2 teaspoon salt
1 1/2 cups sugar
3/4 cup apple sauce
1 tablespoon vegetable oil
1 teaspoon vanilla extract
1 teaspoon almond extract
1 cup flaked almonds
1/2 cup fresh cranberries cut in half.

Mix the flour, baking soda and salt in one bowl and the sugar, applesauce, oil and extracts in another. Mix the contents of the two bowls together. Add the cranberries and almonds. push into baking trays lined with grease-proof paper. Preferably with the width the same as you want the length of your biscotti. Cook in a 160 degree oven for about 25 minutes until light brown. Take out and cool for a little while. Chop the biscotti to the right width and turn each one on it's side. Put back into the oven at 150 degrees for around 5-10 minutes and then turn over and repeat.

The olive tapenade was just a made up recipe:

2 red peppers
1 jar of green pitted olives
2 big spoons of capers
a handful of fresh parsley
a handful of fresh corriandar
4 cloves garlic
a few drops of tabasco
a bit of pepper (and salt if the olives and capers weren't in brine)


The peppers were roasted in a hot oven until they were turning black and then very simply all the ingredients were whizzed together in a food processor and put into jars. It made about 2 jars.

The jam was the most time consuming but not as hard as I thought. The recipe was again adapted from food.com.

3 cups of cranberries
2 cups pitted cherries
1 orange and zest
1/4 teaspoon ground cloves
1/4 teaspoon cinnamon
4 cups sugar
1/2 cup of water
85g liquid pectin


I used frozen cherries and cranberries but they need to be thawed beforehand (believe me we broke a hand held food processor this way!).

All of the fruit and spices were combined in a food processor until roughly chopped (or use a hand held processor). This was then added to a big pan with the sugar and water and heated until bubbling vigorously (not stopping when stirred). Add the pectin at this point and bring back to the vigorous boil for a minute. This should be added to sterilized and hot jars. The jars should then be boiled for 10 mins each and left to cool to seal the jars.

These all seemed to go down well and I enjoyed tasting them as well! The hampers started out as a way to give something nice while trying to save money (we are trying to move into a new place soon) but it ended up being more expensive than we managed as quality ingredients are important. But I was so happy with the results and I think it showed how much work went into them.

I would like to say a massive thank you to my boyfriend for helping so much even though he is not a fan of baking. and also to his housemates for letting us cook in their house!

I hope everyone had a very merry Christmas!

I am having some trouble putting the photos in at the right places being new to blogging. I also managed to lose the best photos off my phone. I will blog the photos next and see if I can retrieve some better photos!