Memories to Cherish

As I write this, we have no idea where we will be spending Christmas Day. Due to COVID-19 lockdowns, our options are fairly limited and much like last year, all our plans keep changing. We don’t want to get our hopes up but it’s looking increasingly unlikely that we will be together again and spending the day with family. After the year we have had, a day of celebration, good food and wine and lots of laughs is just what we all need.

Zoom calls have increased as have videos seeing my family members’ gardens and achievements from their kitchens; it’s been great to talk about something different than the lockdown or the restricted situation we all find ourselves in.

My daughter recently came across my mother’s old recipe books. A great find that my brother Steve rescued and gave me when he was cleaning out my mother’s place after she passed away. I was thrilled to get them as I have many fond memories of cooking with Mum when I was growing up, learning how to make all sorts of dishes and baking together to fill the cake tins for the week ahead. Her cookbooks are full of handwritten recipes written in her beautiful cursive handwriting that my kids find hard to understand at times, so I have become a code cracker in deciphering what certain words or abbreviations mean.

Mum somehow instinctively knew how much to add to a mixture ... a handful of this, a dash of that. As a result, following some of these recipes from these well-loved, handwritten books is a little difficult since some of the methods are fairly scant. My daughter and I decided to make Mum’s Christmas cake recipe over Zoom, from two different cities. We had to code crack the recipe, changing everything from pounds to kilos and grams, adjusting the cooking temperature ... and we both finally found a cake tin big enough.

The recipe is also the same recipe that was used for my brothers’ and sisters’ wedding cakes – it’s a rich, dense fruit cake doused in brandy. The original recipe has two tiers, one cake larger than the other for each wedding, however Mum always made the larger version for the Christmas cake. When it was cooked and cooled, she would wrap it in brown paper and newspaper, after which it sat on the top shelf of the pantry for months while it was gradually sliced into pieces when visitors came or as an afternoon treat until finished. I still can see Mum reading in the lounge or doing her daily crossword, having a small piece of Christmas cake.

So in memory of Mum and all those times baking alongside her as a kid, my daughter and I bought all the ingredients, got the cherries soaking in brandy for 24 hours before, and started baking together in a pandemic world over Zoom. Checking in with each other as we added another ingredient, laughing as we shared different Christmas and cooking moments. There were vast amounts of ingredients but as soon as we started mixing, the smell and taste of the Christmas cake mixture transported me back to our kitchen in Fairway Drive and cooking with Mum. Dad, and whoever was at home at the time, would come into the kitchen and give the mixture a stir with the wooden spoon for good luck before it went into the oven.

The last job of arranging the blanched almonds on top, and patting them with a little bit of water so they wouldn’t dry out I remembered to do, although it wasn’t written into the method. It is strange that after all these years I still remember some of the tips and tricks Mum taught me while baking that recipe, and now I am passing them on and sharing them with my children.

The cake, after five hours of cooking in a low temperature oven, was pricked with a skewer and sprinkled with brandy. Once cooled it was wrapped up in baking paper and newspaper, tied with ribbon and string, and it now sits in my pantry. I will do the brandy ritual again over the next few weeks and closer to Christmas, I’ll eventually slice into it. Hopefully it will taste as good as Mum’s.

The following weekend my daughter and I cooked together again over Zoom using another of Mum’s recipes. This time around it was her much-loved cookies recipe, but with only two lines of a method, it was missing the cooking time, the correct oven temperature and how much fruit to put into the mixture. We just did what we thought was right, added a few new ingredients to the recipe, swapped stories, and laughed as we baked. Mum would have loved it. And isn’t that what a good shared recipe should be all about?

“I HOPE MY FRUIT CAKE WILL TASTE AS GOOD AS MUM’S.”