Snow Globes, Christmas Candles and my Mother's Recipes
With the fourth and final Advent Sunday almost upon us our Christmas baking burden should be beginning to feel a little lighter. The German biscuits have all been made and, once the Irish Christmas Cake is iced this week, only the labor intensive mince pies remain.
Having, baked over 600 assorted cookies with and under the tutelage of my mother, the making of the mince pies will see our roles reversed for the first time and when she becomes the novice and I the master, it will be time, at last, for me to exact my revenge.
Until now, my mother has had full control of the process having, successfully, limited my input to the shopping for ingredients and the photographing of each stage of the baking, as well as to some of the lesser aspects of the actual baking itself such as brushing icing and meringue onto lemon hearts and cinnamon stars.
Our first joint effort was to bake the Elisen Kuchen, and, as these only required some whisking and then mixing I was allowed to make a supervised attempt at them myself. Using the recipes she had given me several weeks previously I had calculated to make 3 times their quantity for the three separate households we were supplying and shopped accordingly. Now, my mother, however, insisted that this an ‘industrial sized calculation’ that would result in ‘far too many biscuits for anybody to ever be able to eat’
“Well, how much do you usually make?” I asked, thinking that I could add one more quantity to that amount in order to accommodate the extra household we were catering for, this year, at my behest.
“I have no idea, but that’s just far too much, that much I do know” she said
“So, how much should we make then??”
“One recipe amount; only one; definitely, absolutely only one”
“What?", I was horrified, " We need double at least - I’m telling you it’s less than you think” I argued
“I have been baking the Christmas biscuits for over 20 years but if you insist that you know better then do what you want” she said, implying the contrary.
I insisted and started weighing the dry ingredients, reading the quantities aloud;
“400 grams of sugar by two…”
“That’s not the amount” my mother interjected
“But, that’s what’s written down – here - in the recipe that you gave me”
“No, no, it’s a lot less – your grandmother always said that there was too much sugar used in recipes”
“But, this is the recipe you gave me”
“Yes, but they’re not the amounts”
“Well, where is the right recipe then?” (I was beginning to lose my temper now).
“It's in my head” my mother answered
“Then, why, in God’s name, did you give me this recipe? How am I supposed to know what’s in your head?
“Well, If you had helped me bake before maybe I would have needed to write it down before”
“Just bloody well tell me how much sugar to use so I can bloody well start the bloody baking”
We continued to bicker while I whisked, mixed and heaped batter onto baking wafers and as we readied the last tray for the oven my mother quietly mused:
“Perhaps we should make another batch – it doesn't seem enough”
Leaving my mother to do so, I went online instead, where, (whilst browsing on Pinterest), I came across some seemingly simple instructions for how to turn old jam jars into snow globes and having a cupboard full of said jars and some spare glitter lying about I thought I’d make a few to sprinkle around the house and astonish my friends with should they not be impressed enough by my, (or more to the point – my mother’s), baking.
I found an angel ornament which was to be glued to the inside of the lid, got the superglue and the glitter and sat down at the coffee table to make my snow globe. The glue was a bit runny and the angel kept sliding around instead of sticking, so I filled the jar with water and glitter while I waited for it to dry. I then ran the tube of glue around the outside of the jars ridged seal and the inside of the lid’s rim and screwed the lid back on. During this process a ‘few’ drops of runny superglue landed on my coffee table so I ran to get a cloth before it set but in my haste knocked over the tub of glitter. My hands were already sticky from working on the ornament so when I tried to wipe up my mess I only succeeded in gluing pieces of cloth and glitter to both my hands and the table.
“At least I have a snow globe” I thought, looking at the mess before me and turned my jam jar upside down.
What I had was a jar full of glitter under which was buried an unseen angel and that leaked water, as well as a very messy coffee table.
After much scraping and scrubbing and some screaming of profanities I decided that it would be best if I were to try and redeem the situation by salvaging the ornament inside the jar because then my only loss would be the jar itself. Thus, order would be restored. It would, in fact, be as if the whole sorry episode had never happened. I took the jar outside to the drain to break it open. Which it did. But so did the head off the angel.
It was then that I decided to turn the remaining jam jars into candle holders by wrapping them in Christmas paper, filling them with sand and standing the tall Christmas candle for the upstairs window sills into each of them.
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