Christmas Cake

I spent the morning and some of the afternoon in the kitchen. First I made a vegan Christmas cake, which is today’s picture. It seemed quite wet compared to my normal recipe and took almost three hours to cook instead of the stated two hours.  It looks a strange shape, but this is because of the angle I took the picture; it is perfectly round and a twenty centimetre cake. It looks and smells as it should do, but until we try it once it is cold I will not know what it tastes like.  If it tastes okay I will make another one as I have enough ingredients, including enough Chia seeds. While getting all the ingredients out of the larder I discovered that I had already purchased 500 grams of Chia seeds, which I had forgotten about!
 
Then I spent ages, cutting up and preparing some Quinces that came in the Riverford box. I have not made Quince jelly since before I came to live here some thirty-two years ago. Quince’s were plentiful where I lived and were generally given away free, but I had not seen any in this location. I had forgotten how time consuming they were to prepare.
 
Then once they were simmering, they take about two hours to go soft, I made two Vegan shepherd’s pies. Not sure they can be called that since they are Vegan! My husband had one for lunch, with vegetables and declared it was the best one he had ever had!
 
After lunch, once the Quince mixture had cooled down I tipped it all into a muslin cloth and it will now drip into a bowl overnight, ready to make into jelly in the morning. I hope it does not collapse from its precarious position.
 
There are a variety of pictures as extras of my day’s baking and cooking. The photograph of the pies was taken before one went into the oven and the other into the freezer, so they look rather pale, but it browned nicely in the oven.
 
The temperature at GMT noon was sixteen degrees Celsius; Cold and damp with several rain showers.