Cottage by the Sea

A tradition from my childhood.
Winter would not be winter without these.
I am not a huge fan but I eat them because it is traditional and it goes back for centuries.
I love being part of that heritage and tradition.
Christmas Cake, Plum Pudding and Gingerbread were staples for wintertime in our home.
Everyone served it. At least everyone I knew.
Let Charles Dickens explain the importance of it.....

" But now, the plates being changed by Miss Belinda, Mrs Cratchit left the room alone — too nervous to bear witnesses — to take the pudding up, and bring it in. Suppose it should not be done enough! Suppose it should break in turning out! Suppose somebody should have got over the wall of the back-yard, and stolen it, while they were merry with the goose: a supposition at which the two young Cratchits became livid! All sorts of horrors were supposed.

    Hallo! A great deal of steam! The pudding was out of the copper. A smell like a washing-day! That was the cloth. A smell like an eating-house and a pastrycook’s next door to each other, with a laundress’s next door to that! That was the pudding. In half a minute Mrs Cratchit entered: flushed, but smiling proudly: with the pudding, like a speckled cannon-ball, so hard and firm, blazing in half of half-a-quartern* of ignited brandy, and bedight* with Christmas holly stuck into the top.

  Oh, a wonderful pudding! Bob Cratchit said, and calmly too, that he regarded it as the greatest success achieved by Mrs Cratchit since their marriage. Mrs Cratchit said that now the weight was off her mind, she would confess she had had her doubts about the quantity of flour. Everybody had something to say about it, but nobody said or thought it was at all a small pudding for a large family. It would have been flat heresy to do so. Any Cratchit would have blushed to hint at such a thing.”

           -Chapter 3, A Christmas Carol, Charles Dickens

You will find here a great recipe for  Christmas Cake .    I found this and it is identical to the one we make
Ideally you make this 2 months ahead to mellow it, but its never too late and you can get started now.
Also you can use Rum for Christmas cake as well. BBC has a nice Hot Buttered rum Christmas cake in which they feed the cake with  2 tbsp dark rum  mixed with 1 tbsp maple syrup.This sounds lovely to me!
Decorate the top with powdered sugar like snow and glazed cherries on the center to look like Holly berries. Real Holly is poisonous so.. don't use it.

The Buttered Rum cake is in British terms but you can Google the equivilents. 


I also found an essentially same recipe for the very Plum Pudding recipe my grandmother had.

Plum Pudding

I was going to list the recipe here but why when these are written out much nicer and have photos to go with them!

 Don't forget to pour some cognac or brandy over the Plum Pudding, turn out the lights and light the cake! It makes a gorgeous presentation.
To get people to eat it, as Americans are very picky sometimes, just remind them that Jane Austen ate these things!
 If the recipe doesn't tell you, you can substitute pumpkin pie spice for the mixed spices in a pinch. It will taste nice as well.

*an archaic English term meaning 'adorned'.
* half a quartern... 1/4 pint

Tuesday 4 will be up later today...