I love feeding people and it rains baked goods on my friends, family and co-workers. And I love  Christmas. Put the two together and it’s time to give the gift of homemade food.   I look for things that are durable and keep for some time.  There’s so much food at Christmas that you don’t want to give food with a short shelf life.  Two of my favourites are Christmas cranberry chutney (this blog post) and stollen, my next blog post. 

My children love cranberry sauce that comes from a can.  So much so that the Davinator made a special dish for the canned stuff that shows off the perfect rings.  But most adults find it too sweet.  I make a cranberry chutney that goes well with turkey, chicken, ham and I’ve even spotted it on a cold beef sandwich.    

Preparation of the chutney is fairly simple.  If you’re going to eat it yourself, it’s easy to let it cool, put it in a storage container and keep it in the fridge.  It keeps well for a week or more.  But if you’re going to ‘gift’ it, you will need to sterilise the jars and put the chutney in jars when it is still hot.  Your chutney should keep for six to eight months although I’ve never had it last longer than a few weeks.  However, it also means that it doesn’t need to be refrigerated and thus good for gifting.  

Chutney recipes are usually flexible; the cranberries are essential (its in the name)and they give the chutney it’s beautiful colour. But I’ve used mango instead of pears & apples and I usually look around the kitchen for any spare fruit that might suit.

If you’re an experienced preserver of food, skip this section.  But if not, I highly recommend this BBC Good Food video  They sterilise the jars in the oven and boil the lids and rims.  I use a jam funnel to help fill the jars (way better than the jug they recommend in the video).  I sterilise the funnel, some tongs and a couple of big spoons at the same time as I’m filling the jars. 

My secret weapon is a pair of heatproof gloves.  These are really helpful for handling the tongs, the jars, etc.    These aren’t life changing but really have their moments.  Mine are a sort of knit and I try hard to keep them away from the boiling water because they soak it up like a sponge.  

Recipe and instructions

Ingredients

2  large onions, chopped

150 grams  minced ginger (save your time, use the jarred stuff from Waitrose)

360 mls wine or cider vinegar

200 grams of brown sugar 

Juice and grated peel from 2 large oranges

4 garlic cloves either chopped fine or pushed through a press

1 teaspoon cinnamon

1 teaspoon black pepper

1 teaspoon ground coriander

1/2 teaspoon nutmeg

1 teaspoon red pepper flakes (omit if you don’t want some zing)

4 large tart apples, chopped into say 1/2 pieces (no need for precision but too big and it’s hard to put on a sandwich, too small and they dissolve in cooking)

4 pears, chopped in the same manner as the apples

1 kilo of cranberries

A small cinnamon stick for each jar. 

Instructions

1. Put all ingredients from the onions through to the red pepper flakes in a big pot (not aluminium) and bring to simmer.
2. Add the apples, simmer for five minutes.  Add the pears and cook for another five minutes. 
3. Add the cranberries, bring to a boil and then back it down to a slow simmer.  Cooking time will vary depending on what kind of pot you use.  I would estimate 30 minutes and then start checking on consistency.   The Davinator likes his chutney of a spreadable consistency but sticky enough to hang onto the sandwich.  Or cheese.   Use your imagination, he puts chutney on it.  
4. Start getting your jars and lids ready.   To prevent bacteria (and thereby have wasted your time) the chutney needs to go in the jars while the jars AND the chutney are both hot.  If you’re comfortable with this process, go for it.  If not, go watch this video! 
5. I like using the jam funnel to fill the jars, but make sure it fits in the jars. Great tip from BBC Good Food – get more job ready than you need.  I filled 6 x 400 ml jars.  I often do several different sizes.   
6. Fill the jars and carefully put a cinnamon stick in the hot chutney.  Then put the lids on.   Use your imagination to decorate the jars.  Pinterest is a great place to get ideas; go there and search ‘jam jar decoration’.  If you haven’t used Pinterest, I’m not trying to ruin your life.  Some people have too much time…….
7. This should keep for about six months but refrigerate as soon as opened and use in a week.  

Enjoy your Christmas preparations.  It is the most wonderful time of the year. 

Or yourself!  It’s the run into Christmas and when I’m not baking or decorating, I’m Christmas shopping.  I try and give only gifts that people want.  Seems simple, but it can be surprisingly time consuming.

Here’s my list of 13 great gadgets for a baker that will fit in a Christmas stocking. Well,  maybe not in the min-stocking in the photo.  All really useful and none very expensive.  I am possibly Amazon’s biggest customer in the UK but all of these should be fairly widely available via a google search.

But first, why is a bakers dozen 13? Are bakers just bad at counting? Not really.

The most widely accepted theory is about avoiding a beating.  There were laws in England that based the price of bread on  the price of the wheat used to make it. Bakers who cheated  their customers by overpricing or selling undersized loaves or rolls were  punished by fines or flogging.  We all know its hard to make baked goods uniform and medieval bakers did NOT have a digital scale to help them.   The bakers would add that bit extra to ensure their goods didn’t come up ‘short’.  Hence, the baker’s dozen.

1. Dough scraper: a nice plastic gadget that gets all the batter out of the bowl, handy for kneading wet dough,  scraping stuff off the counter tops, mixing heavy dough, cutting dough.   Upper right corner.
   

   Clockwise from top left; countertop protector, dough scraper, fast read thermometer, cheap shower cap.

2. Plastic shower caps – but not the cheapest ones.  You can buy 100 on Amazon or eBay for £6.50 but they are so cheap it’s essentially single use plastic. We’re not fanatics but we’re trying to avoid plastic waste. So, give  the boxed ones that are 10 for £3 a try.  They last longer and survive a gentle rinse out if you get dough on one.
3. Thermometer(s).  Baking (all cooking actually) is essentially a chemistry experiment.  It’s good to be precise when it makes a difference.  There are instant read thermometers that will tell you if you roast is cooked,  your bread is ready or your boiling sugar is hard crack.   And things like oven temperature can be the difference between an exploding chocolate cake that creates an oven cleaning emergency or a mouth watering Sacher torte.  I have three I rely on; one to check the temperature of baked goods, one to leave in the roast and one to check oven temperature.  Search ‘instant read thermometer’ ‘oven thermometer’ ‘roast thermometer’.
   
   
4. Loaf pan liners. Paper liners save greasing pans, make clean up easier and a way less fiddly than cutting parchment to fit.   They come in 1 and 2 pound sizes.  There’s also pan liners for round cakes.   And the amount of fat that is used to grease a cake pan can destabilise the chemistry of your cakes.  Some day I will write on blog post on my struggle with making a Victoria sponge cake.  It’s my nemesis.  But pan liners helped me get there.
5. Offset spatula. Nerd alert here.   An offset spatula allows for better control and precision when icing cakes or lifting and moving cookies, chocolates or anything delicate.  Better yet, a set of three offset spatulas in different sizes.  The baking nerd in your life will love you. 
6. Pastry mat. A pastry mat is a flat sheet of plastic with markings that helps you eyeball when the dough has been flattened to a six inch diameter disk., for example.  A great short cut.  Also really speeds clean up.  Instead of painfully scraping up dough or flour you can just put the whole thing straight in the sink.  Roll it up tight and it should fit in the Christmas stocking. 
7. Egg whisk. Okay, more nerd stuff.  I went on an all day ‘egg’ course with my mate Lisa.  We cooked and ate a LOT of eggs.  Fried eggs, poached eggs, omelettes, scrambled eggs.  We learned the ‘right’ way to crack an egg (and a one handed crack method).  The best gadget we saw was a specialist egg whisk.  Lisa bought one for me later.  Here it is.
   
8. Miniature tape measure. I have a tiny tape measure in a magnetic case that lives on the extractor fan in my baking kitchen.  It means I don’t have remember (or guess) the dimensions of my multitude of pans, tins, baking trays etc.  It’s the kind of thing you might get in a Christmas cracker, but it’s a super little tool.
   
9. Spacers for rolling dough and sugar paste icing.  Back to our desire for precision.  If you’re making cookies or some kinds of dough or pastry – you want to roll it out to an even thickness.  Spacers are simple plastic guides – you put them on your pastry mat, whack the dough in between them and roll away.  Here’s a link to a YouTube video because it’s hard to visualise these until you’ve used them. 
10. Active dry yeast. Many bakers may have a favourite type of yeast, you can take a peek in your baker’s cupboard and see.  But if they make bread,  active dry yeast is a good bet.  I use a French brand ‘saf-levure’ that comes in 500 gram tins.  It might be a tight fit in the Christmas stocking but its top quality and its about 1/4 the price of supermarket purchases on a per gram basis. 
11. Cookie cutters.  Shaped cookies are not just for Christmas anymore.  So many shapes, themes and materials these days.   You can cut cookies for any holiday or special occasion. Find a shape that is special to them (I have a friend who’s a unicorn freak and I have a unicorn cookie cutter to make cookies for her) or maybe find them an antique biscuit cutter.  I have a set of Star Wars cookie cutters.  Serious Star Wars nerds in our house.
    
    

    One of my first forays into royal icing.

12. Good quality hand cream. Bakers wash their hands about 500 times a day.  I don’t actually know, I’ve never counted but it’s a lot.   I have two pricy favourites; ‘Occitane en Provence’ shea butter hand cream or ‘iColoniali’ myrrh hand cream.   Find a scent that your baker loves.
    
13. And finally – edible gold glitter (or any other special sprinkles for your baker).   Try this website for some fun and funky sprinkles.
    

Have a lovely Christmas, and bake on everyone.

Okay, I couldn’t resist just one more.  A stand to help fill your piping bags…….

A plastic gadget that should be cheaper but works a bomb.

Merry Christmas all…….