T minus 3 sleeps!  Can you believe it?  After all these weeks of baking and cooking and veganising jelly the time has nearly come to get down to the good stuff.  The actual eating.

There is one small job left to do – decorating the Christmas cake, which should have been nicely fed with brandy for the last four weeks and be smelling absolutely delicious!

As it’s a traditional cake I’m decorating it traditionally, with a layer of marzipan and a layer of fondant icing.  And I’m sticking to another tradition as well.

For as long as I can remember, Pa Yogini has made the marzipan.  He’d put Christmas carols on the radio and get himself and the kitchen in a sticky mess.  Then I would eat too much of the marzipan and feel sick, not leaving enough to cover the cake!

So I used Pa Yogini’s ancient recipe but rather than a beaten egg, this year I used a flax egg. Turns out not only does this work a charm, but it also doesn’t create the sticky mess that egg laden marzipan makes, thus saving Pa’s clothes and making Ma Yogini happy.

Veganism 2  Eggs 0

Ingredients
6oz/175g icing sugar
6oz/175g ground almonds
1 flax egg
1 teaspoon almond essence

Make up your flax egg and add the almond essence to the mix – leave it to settle for 10 minutes

Mix together  the sugar and almonds.  Make a well in the middle and add your flax egg.  Mix together with a fork.  After a while it will seem as though the ingredients will never bind into a ball of marzipan, that’s when you need to get your hands in there and create the ball, just as if you’re making pastry.

Eventually it will look like this.

Roll it out flat with a rolling pin (making sure you cover the surface with icing sugar so it doesn’t stick) and set it to one side.

You’ll then need some apricot glaze or jam.  Put about a tablespoonful in a cup and microwave it for 30 seconds until it has melted.  Then brush it over your cake with a pastry brush.

Lay the marzipan over the top and press down.  You might want to roll the top with your rolling pin to make sure you have a flat surface for the icing.

Ideally, you should leave it overnight before you put the icing on, but try and leave it for a at least half an hour if you have time.

Now here’s where I cheated.  Honestly I couldn’t work out a suitable way of making either royal or fondant icing without egg whites and as I was running out of time I bought some Ready to Roll Fondant Icing from the Co-op which assures me it is vegan.  It has some rather horrible looking ingredients so I am determined to figure this out for next year, but cake is hardly full of the most nutritional ingredients anyway so it will have to do.

Basically you treat the icing in the same way as the cake – roll it out on an icing-sugared surface then slightly dampen the marzipan layer with water to make it sticky and place the icing on top.  Press it down and roll it flat.

And then get a funky ribbon to cover up the untidy edges (or y’know, be less lazy than me and take the icing right down to the bottom!).

So there you have it.  A very vegan Christmas.  I have to say that it has been more of a success than I thought.  I never thought the jelly or the marzipan would work – and what do you know!

Thank you as ever for reading, and I hope you enjoy some or all of these recipes this festive season!

A few weeks ago I said I wasn’t making a Christmas pudding this year.  Cake and pies are more than enough and sometimes, after a heavy main course, you want something light, something fruity, something pallette cleansing.

And that’s where this champagne jelly comes in.

Readers, I’m not going to lie to you.  I’ve made this recipe over and over again since I was a little girl (a little girl let loose with champagne – I know!) and I do often make it using gelatin.  Yup, gelatin – that stuff derived from boiling up cow’s feet or whatever it is.  But this year I promised you a vegan Christmas and a vegan Christmas is what you’re going to get.  So a big warm welcome and Happy Christmas to Agar flakes.

Agar is made from seaweed.  You can get it in health food stores, large supermarkets and Asian grocery stores.  It sets like gelatin with no smell and no taste.  Sweet!  It sets quicker than gelatin (in about an hour) and doesn’t even need the fridge to set.  However it is substantially more expensive than gelatin and takes much longer to dissolve.  You are going to need to leave the mixture simmering for about 15-20 minutes to make sure that it all melts (whereas gelatin takes about 5 minutes), and I personally recommend putting the mixture through a sieve before putting it in glasses to stop it crystalising.

I’m going to give measurements for both Agar and gelatin and then you can make your own minds up.  No judgin’

Ingredients
500ml/18 floz sparkling wine (don’t actually use champagne for this, it’s a waste, use cava!)**
50g/2oz caster sugar
Handful of purple grapes or blueberries
3tsp powdered gelatin OR 6 tsp Agar flakes OR 1 tsp Agar powder (agar powder is much more concentrated than flakes)

Put a fork in the top of the bottle to keep the remaining champagne fizzy for later.  I have no idea why this works, but it does.

Place half the champange, the sugar and the gelatin/Agar in a pan and very slowly bring to almost boiling, stirring continuously. Then add the rest of the champagne and simmer until everything is melted (about 20 minutes if you are using Agar, be very careful not to let it boil over). If you are using Agar I would then sift the liquid to make sure there are no unmelted flakes left as these will crystalise when they set.

Have glasses or bowls ready with some grapes or blueberries in the bottom.

Pour the mixture over the fruit and leave to set – 1 hour for Agar, about 3 hours for gelatin – in the fridge as they are best served cold.

Nothing says Christmas quite like gingerbread.

And nothing feels quite like Christmas is on its way than baking gingerbread in the light of the Christmas tree with carols playing in the background!

So here’s how:-

Ingredients
(makes about 30 cookies)
12oz/350g plain flour
2 teaspoons baking powder
3-6 teaspoons of ground ginger (depending on how gingery you like it)
4oz/100g vegan margarine
6oz/175g soft dark brown sugar
1 flax egg
4oz/100g black treacle (molasses)

Sift the flour, baking powder and ginger together and stir.  Then rub in the margarine by hand until it forms coarse breadcrumbs.

Stir in the sugar.

Then make a well in the centre of the mix and add the treacle and the flax egg.

Get your hands in there to mix it all together – you may need to add a little more water – until it forms a ball of dough (see above).

Roll the dough out onto a lightly floured surface.  I tend to cut the dough into three or four sections then roll it out so it doesn’t become too unweildy.  It needs to be about 0.5cm thick….

…but a certain uneveness gives it a homemade charm!

Use cookie cutters to cut out shapes.  We have all kinds of cookie cutters, one in the shape of Santa that looks like a big fat blob and another like a candy cane, but the candy cane shaped cookies always break, so this year, for the sake of formality, I stuck to stars!

Lay your gingerbread shapes out on lined baking trays and bake in batches, one tray at a time, at 190*C/375*F/Gas Mark 5 for 8 minutes per tray, then take out and allow to cool on the tray.

*oh little star of bethlehem….* (sing to yourself loudly and out of tune whilst gingerbread is cooking)

Once cool, you can ice them in anyway you like.  This year I just went for a sprinkling of confectionary sugar….

…and then ate them!

Himself likes to make rude shapes out of the remaining dough. But I have left that gem to your imaginations….

Gingerbread makes great Christmas presents and can be frozen for up to one month.  Make sure you put it in the freezer before you start eating – otherwise you will eat them all….

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