Mince Pies

My first encounter with mincemeat pies was several years ago in Britain (where else?) as Christmas drew closer. They were store-bought but still they were delicious. When I visited Britain again this November, mincemeat pie was one of the first things I purchased and it still tasted as good as I remembered.

I realized it can’t be that difficult to make mincemeat pies of my own, after all I know more or less show to make pies and the filling couldn't be too hard to make. As I looked into the ingredients for the filling, I learned about its history as well. Originally traced back to the Crusades, it seems the pie was brought back to Britain from the Middle East. The recipe used to contain mutton or beef meat with spices and fruit but nowadays the meat tends to be omitted. Some people use beef fat instead of butter for the filling so that „the meat part“ is kept in the recipe but since I'm not such a big fan of animal fat in baking, I decided to stick to using butter.

Christmas Gingerbread Cookies

There's no recipe this time.

This weekend I got together with Jana, a friend of mine from work, and we baked some pretty neat gingerbread cookies. Now, we only had three cookie cutters - two shaped like squirrels (mine) and one shaped like a star (hers). I didn't feel like making a gingerbread dough since it is MUCH easier to just go and buy pre-made one in a store (I dunno about store-bought dough in other countries, but Babické dough is fantastic here in CZ). Maybe I'll make gingerbread dough from scratch next year but not having to deal with the procedure and having to keep it in the fridge overnight gave us more time to play with the shapes and decoration.

We split the dough into quarters. One became large squirrels, one small squirrels, one stars and the last one we made into custom shaped Tetris blocks. There's a little video shot by Jana.

This year's Christmas will be like no other... cookie-wise.

Ginger and Spice Pear Cake

Last week it was quite cold here in Prague. I met up with a friend of mine after not seeing each other for a very long time and to hide from the cold weather, we popped in a café of sorts where I ordered a hot pear juice with cloves. It was so good that I wondered if I could make something like that but in a cake.

Turns out I can. I found this one recipe and changed more to my liking. The original called for some ingredients I had to substitute (which gave me an idea for another post). It also looked like a pie-cake hybrid... The way my cake turned out was almost traditional cake. The high amount of liquids in it give the cake a very soft and moist texture and the spices complement each other phenomenally. I just wish it looked a bit better because I'm afraid its looks won't attract any attention.

Also this recipe marks the very first time I made a video recipe. There is a Boardgames & Baking Youtube channel and the first video is me making this cake. I don't know how well and how far this will go but I found out that making videos is easier than I had thought.