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You are here: Home / London food blogger events / Christmas cookie swap 2006

Christmas cookie swap 2006

by Jeanne Horak on January 12, 2007 9 Comments in London food blogger events

Christmas-cookie-swap

So Christmas has been and gone, as has new year – and as much as I try to pretend I’m still on holiday, the harsh reality is that I am back at work, and it’s high time I got back to regular blogging!  And what better way to do that than to finish off some unfinished business from last year and tell you about the London food bloggers’ Christmas cookie swap.

Since Christmas is traditionally a time for baking (in fact, one of the Very Few Times that I actually get up off my butt and bake!), we decided that this would be the perfect time for a bunch of bloggers to get together and exchange their Christmas cookies while imbibing a lot of mulled wine.  It’s not as if we need much encouragement to get together 😉  And so, at the appointed time one Saturday in December, we all descended on Johanna‘s house: Jenni, Xochitl, Bonnie, Bill, Laura, our honorary non-blogger Sarah and, of course, me and Johanna.

 

 

Because man (and woman, and blogger) cannot live by cookies alone, Johanna had decided to precede the great Christmas cookie swap with a little Austrian winter food:  a raclette and a cheese fondue.  Although you are probably all familiar with cheese fondue, that wonderful combination of melty cheese, tangy kirsch (or beer or wine) and a little cornflour to bind it all into a delicious gooey-ness into which you can dip bits of bread, raclette is less well known – at least in my neck of the woods!  Although we often used to have cheese fondue on a Friday night when I was a child, the first time I encountered raclette was outside Neal’s Yard Dairy at Borough Market.  First foremost, raclette is a type of cheese – a semi-firm pressed cheese made from cow’s milk and aged for 3-6 months.  It has a texture rather like Gouda but a tangier taste.  Since 2003 it has enjoyed AOC protection, meaning that only cheeses made in the traditional way, from local ingredients, in predefined areas (Valais, Savoie, Franche-Comte and Brittany) can be called raclette.

 

 

The term raclette can also be a dish similar in principle to a cheese fondue, made (unsurprisingly) with raclette cheese.  This is said to have originated in the Valais canon of Switzerland when farmers took food along while moving cows from pasture to pasture.  Usually they had some cheese and some bread, and my a happy accident, a round of cheese was left by the fire, making it warm and gooey.  The farmers so enjoyed scraping the melted cheese onto their bread that this became a tradition – voila!  The dish later developed to comprise melted cheese on boiled potatoes, served with cornichons or pickled onions, and this is the way that Neal’s Yard Dairy serves it from their Borough shop.  Now, clearly, Johanna was not going to be building a fire and leaving rounds of expensive cheese lying around her suburban house (!), so it’s a good thing there’s an alternative way to enjoy your raclette at home:  the raclette grill.  You simply pop some raclette cheese, garnish of your choice (we had a lovely mushroom paste) and maybe a slice of meat (pancetta in this picture) into the adorable little raclette pans and pop them under the table-top grill.  The hardest thing is a) remembering to remove yours before it overcooks and b) taking your own pan, not somebody else’s (sorry Sarah!!).  The cheesy, melty contents of the pan are then scraped onto some potatoes and eaten with cornichons on the side.  Heaven.

 

Christmas cookies

 

After rather a lot of cheese and mulled wine, we had a little rest before moving on to coffee and cookies – hurrah!  People realyl outdid themselves this year as all the cookies were delicious.  I don’t think I got them all on film, but let’s see if I can describe them correctly:

*  Johanna’s mocha-choca beans drizzled with white chocolate (visible on the right of this picture);

*  Jenni’s chocolate rounds sandwiched with dulce de leche and rolled in coconut (visible at the very top of the first picture);

*  Xochitl’s Mexican wedding cookies with cranberries (visible as four white lozenges on the right in the top picture); lemon sugar cookies (dead centre in the second picture); and Christmassy ginger snaps (decorated with red Christmas trees in the top photo);

*  Bill’s Bakewell-style fruit mince pies with homemade fruit mince (covered in slivered almonds and visible at the top of the second picture);

*  Bonnie’s chocolate hazelnut cookies and fruit mince cookies (sadly, not pictured);

*  Laura’s ginger spice drop cookies (visible at the bottom left and right of the second picture);

*  Sarah’s double chocolate chip cookies (visible at about 10 o’clock in the top picture); and

*  my chocolate oat and sesame cookies (three visible at the bottom of the first picture) and double peanut butter cookies (visible at about 5 o’clock in the first picture).

Wow.  We quietly munched our way through A LOT of cookies that afternoon, making an effort to taste each one.  For my money (apart from my own cookies!), the favourites were Laura’s spicy ginger cookies and Xochitl’s crumbly Mexican wedding cookies, but let me assure you that I wouldn’t turn up my nose at any of these 😉  Of course the best part of the afternoon was right at the end, where we all grabbed our cookie tins and stocked up on each other’s cookies, so that the memory of a lovely afternoon could linger for days and days as we munched happily on each other’s cookies.  Now that’s  the spirit of Christmas!

For the voyeurs among you, here is a pic of all of us around the table, contemplating the mountains of cheese we are about to consume.  From left we have Johanna, Sarah, Laura, Owain, Bonnie, Xochitl and Jenni.

 

 

[And for those of you who have been wondering what is happening with the Menu for Hope III campaign, we raised… $60,000!  Thank you VERY MUCH to everybody who contributed in any way whatsoever.  That is a truly awesome total and the foodblogging community can rightly be proud of themselves.]

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  1. bill says

    January 13, 2007 at 12:52 am

    What a deliriously delicious concept! You’ve made me quite envious….

    Reply
  2. ejm says

    January 13, 2007 at 6:18 pm

    Those cookies look delicious and what a great idea to have a cookie exchange party.
    I love cheese fondue – and I just remembered that THAT was what we were going to have on New Year’s Eve! I’m guessing that raclette would be right up our alley too!
    -Elizabeth
    P.S. Poor us 😉 we had to make do with orange, red onion and red leaf lettuce salad along side chicken liver and green peppercorn pate on raisin fennel rye bread for our New Year’s Eve midnight feast….

    Reply
  3. Bronwyn says

    January 14, 2007 at 12:55 pm

    Just made Peanut butter biscuits – sadly not yours as dont know where to get the P/nut butter chips and feel hazy on what shortening is… Used a yummy recipe from “Cooking for Engineers”. Hope to try the other biscuit recipes on the post (yours!)soon…

    Reply
  4. johanna says

    January 14, 2007 at 2:40 pm

    LOVE your pictures of the raclette! i always find it difficult to render. what a great time we had – can’t wait for next year’s, when I’ll be able to have some mulled wine again!!!

    Reply
  5. David says

    January 14, 2007 at 9:40 pm

    I love raclette, although tell Johanna it’s Swiss, not Austrian (although I think she knows that..maybe she was trying to pull one over on you for free cookies.) Although after a few glasses of mulled wine, who the heck cares!

    Reply
  6. neil says

    January 15, 2007 at 3:07 am

    Raclette parties are wonderful, riotous affairs. We actually manage to do them in front of our open fire, but not for many people though. All the cookies sound so drool worthy, especially the chocolate, oat and sesame cookies.

    Reply
  7. Jeanne says

    January 15, 2007 at 11:58 am

    Hi Bill
    I have to say it is such a great way to get into the Christmas spirit, and gives you an excuse to bake faaaaar too much with a clear conscience!
    Hi Elizabeth
    I remember having a cheese fondue party on new year’s eve as a student – it was a blast! Pity I didn’t know what raclette was back then 😉 And, oh, how did you suffer through that dinner?? LOL! Chicken liver pate is one of my favourites and the bread sounds totalyl heavenly. Can I come over to yours next year?!
    Bron!!
    So glad you stopped by! I have a feeling Reese’s peanut butter chips haven’t quite made it to South Africa yet – I’m not even sure where to get them here in London. These were a gift from Moira… Shortening should be less of a problem – it’s a block of vegetable fat and here, it’s stocked near the prepared pastry and the butter. But if you can’t find shortening, you can substitute an equal amount of butter. You will LOVE the oat and sesame choc cookies, btw 🙂
    Hi Johanna
    Thanks *blush*. I’m glad I captured the melty deliciousness of the cheese! ANd yes, I’m looking forward to having some mulled wine (or champagne??) with you soon 🙂
    Hi Neil
    Hmmmm, riotous raclette parties in front of the open fire – sounds like an idea! And I must say, the selection of cookies was outstanding. Do make the sesame oat & chocolate ones – they are easy and quite heavenly 🙂

    Reply
  8. ejm says

    January 15, 2007 at 2:03 pm

    Absolutely, you must! We usually start dining around 10:00 so plan to arrive around 9:30 or so. Don’t forget your shiny hats and to bring pots and wooden spoons for midnight. I can’t promise that we’ll be serving pate as the main feature… the menu changes yearly. The pate recipe we use is based on the one in “The Silver Palate Cookbook” by Julee Rosso & Sheila Lukins.
    The fennel raisin rye bread works fantasticly (fantastically??) in cheese fondue as well. It’s also fabulous toasted.
    -Elizabeth
    P.S. I adore peanut butter cookies! I will have to manipulate my husband into baking them – like you, Jeanne, I generally only bake cookies at Christmas time. I’ll get him to use butter rather than shortening… it has to taste better that way, doesn’t it? 😀
    P.P.S. fennel raisin rye bread recipe here:
    http://etherwork.net/recipes/yeastbread.html#Clarks

    Reply
  9. Bron says

    January 18, 2007 at 7:32 am

    Yum! They all look so good, love the white chocolate? on the choc, oat sesames.. anyhow I’ll take one of each please! Oh and the gooey raclette looks divine, I’ve only experienced it once, I’d love to try it again!

    Reply
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Jeanne Horak is a freelance food and travel writer; recipe developer and photographer. South African by birth and Londoner by choice, Jeanne has been writing about food and travel on Cooksister since 2004. She is a popular speaker on food photography and writing has also contributed articles, recipes and photos to a number of online and print publications. Jeanne has also worked with a number of destination marketers to promote their city or region. Please get in touch to work with her Read More…

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