Time for some Christmas cooking!

It’s that time of the year when I decide to camp out in the kitchen. I love the cooking and baking that the festive season brings, and one of my holiday specials is amaretti. In particular a softer version than the commercial classics. They are easily made and don’t require many ingredients or specialist equipment. Egg whites, ground almonds, caster sugar, icing sugar, vanilla extract, and amaretto/almond liqueur. I use the recipe from Charlotte’s Lively Kitchen. It’s rare that I find an online recipe that I can use without modification, but this is one that works well every time and scales well too.

Dessert on the big day is going to be a chocolate cassata semifreddo. Separately those are words that represent things I like, but together…let’s see how it works out. It’s a recipe from Georgina Hayden at the Guardian and was straightforward to prepare. Or would have been, if I had the ingredients. What do you do if you don’t have any condensed milk left? Fear not, intrepid reader, for there is always another way.

Turns out if you have a tin of evaporated milk laying around, you can turn that into condensed milk with the addition of sugar, heat, and time. Not too much heat as I discovered rapidly after burning the first try, and more time than you’d think. It’s about evaporating off as much of the water as possible leaving a thick, gloopy mixture with a slightly caramalised colour. It’s remarkably similar to the shop bought stuff. Once I had that, it was just a matter of using the mixer to beat ricotta, then mascarpone followed by the condensed milk.

Once the mixture was well combined, I added chopped marzipan, glace cherries, pistachios, and dark chocolate. The result was poured into a 2 pound loaf tin lined with cling film, and placed in the freezer to set. Before serving I’ll drizzle it with melted dark chocolate and top with some more glace fruit.

We’ve had a busy week and weekend so the remainder of the day will be spent crashed out watching Christmas films. This includes the perennial tradition of rediscovering that the trap portion of Home Alone that everyone remembers is really short and pretty much at the end of the movie. It’s an iconic part, but most of the film revolves around Kevin’s journey to becoming more self-sufficient and learning more about his neighbourhood. It’s still a great flick all these years later.

This is just a taste of the Christmas cooking yet to come. I hope you all have a wonderful time in the run up to the big day.