Christmas Baking

We are out of mincemeat and that set of a bigger chain of events. By “out of mincemeat” I mean the 18^th century recipe using meat and suet and 2 cups of booze that we’ve been making for years. All the ingredients are in the house so it will happen. Soon. Maybe today.

The rest of the chain is a romp down memory lane. I used to bake on Christmas Eve; being a career person, that was the allotted moment for items that might have been better with a bit of aging, like fruit cake. Never mind. If all you’ve got is Christmas Eve, so be it. 

Now that I have lots of time, I don’t do Christmas baking. Costco and sugar concerns sidelined that activity until this year when we ran out of mincemeat and I got nostalgic about some old recipes. I inherited a couple of favourites from my mother except for the fruit cake recipe that I begged from a neighbour sometime before I was 12. Which wasn’t recent!

I made the fruitcake yesterday and it has to be the most expensive recipe in the universe. There isn’t really enough batter to call it a cake, more like a fruit/nut bar that would sustain you on a serious hike. After I’d made it I found a notation to double the batter but on second thought it could easily be tripled and there would still be a LOT of fruit and nuts. And it is delicious. I don’t care if you don’t like fruitcake, you would love this one. 

scotch cake with glace cherry bits

check out the ancient 2 cup sifter!

This afternoon I made dominoes and scotch cake, aka Nanaimo bars and shortbread. Like so much of life there are rules. Scotch cake should be made with brown sugar (who came up with the icing sugar version?) and three ingredients: butter, brown sugar, and flour and cut out with Mum’s old cookie cutters. Dominoes should be topped with unsweetened chocolate even though I think Mum’s recipe originally might have said semi-sweet. If you don’t already do those things, we need to talk, except for Mum’s cutters of course.

So Christmas dinner dessert is taken care of AND we have a precious bottle of  Kaye’s lemon curd for lemon tarts, not that there is much room for dessert though, strangely, people manage!

Speaking of baking, earlier today we went to the Ginger Bread fundraiser event for Habitat for Humanity at the Parkside Hotel. Don’t get me started on parking in the downtown core, but having circled a couple of times we scored a place right outside our destination. We noticed that most of the ginger bread entries are from “home chefs” now while a few years ago they were mostly professionals. It doesn’t take more than a second to figure out that for a professional chef to do one of these creations either they don’t have a life or their employer is beyond generous. I didn’t pay a lot of attention to the hours but one entry claimed 120. You get my point.

The entries have to be completely edible, like the Rose Parade has to be all botanical, right down to any writing. Edible ink? Who knew? This year's theme is Canada 150.

multi-cultural BC

adorable elves

my second choice

Habitat is a terrific organization putting real people in real housing and this event apparently generates a decent amount of money. Get yourself down to Parkside on Humbolt, a seriously beautiful hotel lobby, and hope that crazy bakers keep on wanting to support the event and cause. I voted for the National Parks entry and Jim fell for the Mountie/beaver. 

the iconic red serge

celebrating national parks

Walking up the street to Cora’s for lunch we came across these beauties; mahonia japonica.

 It was a very satisfying day, topped off by dinner prepared by my in-house chef James Francis.

December Decorations

The house is decorated, always a slow dance because I fuss with placement and don't want everything pulled out at once. Order out of chaos and now we enjoy the result. It is dark here in Victoria at this time of year, with only a scant 8 hours of daylight and the sun so low in the sky it doesn't clear the nearby trees. To compensate there is a never ending list of events, parades, festivals, and activities; and in our little piece of the world we like lights and decorations as a distraction. We like to sit by the fire with the Christmas lights and decorations glowing, and enjoy some wine and each other's company. And friends and family of course. 

We've stopped collecting Santa Clauses and have reduced what we had by at least half because, you know, there is a limit and I do believe that less is more. It may not always be obvious. 

Now Jim collects Christmas movies on our PVR and it is such a nice change to watch mindless good wishes and happy endings!

November was wet. We had some amount of precipitation for a record 28 out of 30 days, even some snow. Ugh and ugh. We are having a La Niña year, in my opinion a little girl who cries a lot and has occasional temper tantrums. It will pass.

Right now we are having a respite with sun in the forecast for the next week and daytime temps of 8 or 9 Celsius. Not too shabby for December on almost the 49^th parallel.

I took advantage of the sunshine today, December 6, to grab some pics of seasonal decorations in our neighbourhood. Enjoy.

winter planter

Santa taking orders

beach flotsam

laurel topiary

berberis

rhododendron way out of season

crab apples

hanging on!

yellow pyracantha

fine dining on a hotdog at Capitol Iron

A Remarkable Thing...

We went to Jamestown, Virginia a couple of years ago and now see another piece of the story at Port-Royal at the mouth of the Annapolis River, Nova Scotia. This was the first real experiment in living in the northern New World, led by Champlain who invented The Order of Good Cheer to ward off serious cabin fever. Port Royal (French 1605) and Jamestown (English 1607) were “it and dit” for timing and not too far apart as the crow flies or warships sail. It was a volatile era of territorial expansion and the two forts were front and centre. Port Royal lost the skirmish and was destroyed in 1613.  An interesting side-bar is that the reconstruction of Port-Royal, from a set of original plans, was energized by a woman from Massachusetts. Construction of this first-ever replica built on the first-ever National Historic was from 1939-1941, ironic timing considering world affairs in those years.

window at Port-Royal

the main entrance or Port-Royal

This Parks Canada interpreter/guide was excellent and later we realized we were seeing his face every where in the marketing materials for the area. At the Tidal Bore Power plant, we were told he is one of a set of identical twins, Alan and Wayne, who both work for Parks Canada. No wonder we saw him everywhere!

Try to keep up here...

The French moved the burned-out Port-Royal settlers 10 kilometers up the river and the now town of Port Royal survived until turned over to the English in the Treaty of Utrecht in 1713. The English renamed the town Annapolis Royal after Queen Anne and it was the original capital city of Nova Scotia, replaced by Halifax in 1749. Fort Anne was built by the Scots in 1629 to protect Annapolis Royal. 

Fort Anne

Finally, the point of the story: the Fort Anne Tapestry. How does every Canadian not know about this remarkable piece of work? Begun in 1985 as a way to commemorate the centennial of Parks Canada, the project got underway in 1988 and was unveiled in 1998. There are four panels, each 4.5 feet wide and 8 feet high for a total of 8x18, and each representing a century of local history. Hundreds of people worked on it, including Queen Elizabeth. The detail is astonishing, including a Mi’kmaq shield made from birch bark and adorned with porcupine quill, a tiny “pearl” necklace, lace, and innumerable types of stitches.

The room is long and narrow so you can’t get a decent photo of the entire piece and my phone camera didn’t do justice to the vibrant colours but I hope you’ll get the gist. And if you get a chance to see it, do; it was a highlight of this trip.

Buildings and More...

Maritime human history is complicated with European contact beginning in 1605 at Port Royal, Nova Scotia. Those original Europeans, under Champlain and Sieur de Monts lived cooperatively with the Mi’kmaq but that harmony ended with arrival of the British. Six colonial wars between England and France, which initiated the expulsion of the Acadians; the Highland Clearances; the Great Irish Famines; and the American Revolution and Civil War; all impacted the area, leaving behind a rich mixture of culture and tradition.

In the 2^nd half of the 19^th century times were good for the rich: the lumber barons, the shipping magnates, and the merchants. On our travels throughout southern Nova Scotia we (Jim, Derek, Gayle, and me) were struck by the beautiful, large, homes of that era, the majority of which seem to be lovingly looked after. Of course there are many that are in stages of disrepair and we speculated what it might cost to bring one back to glory, starting with the foundation, roof, windows, wiring, plumbing, heating systems. You would have a grand dame on your hands that still isn’t insulated against the North Atlantic winds, with endless exterior painting required; a project not for the faint of heart or shallow pockets.

There are a lot of churches in the Maritimes too, many of them empty or repurposed. Along the Acadian Shore we came across two enormous structures for a very sparse population, 10 kilometers apart: Eglise Sainte Marie and Eglise St Bernard. Eglise Ste Marie is one of the largest wooden buildings in North America, built in 2 years (1903-1905) by 1500 volunteers under the supervision of an illiterate architect. The walls are lined with painted canvas! The church holds 800 people but only about 50 people attend mass so it’s held in the community center across the street. Mass is only held in the church at Christmas, Easter and for weddings; the furnace burns 81 litres of fuel an hour and it takes about 3 hours to bring the building to a reasonable temperature. The community is trying to raise enough money to fix the roof before interior repairs are undertaken. St Bernard took 32 (1910-1942) years to build, made from granite hauled by oxen from Yarmouth, open from May to October.

Rounding out the interesting buildings scenario, we came across this amazing cottage/house in Mill Cove near Birchy Head. It looks as though someone drove a lobster boat up on the rocks and then added steel stilts to keep it there. That’s probably not how it happened!

The tides in the Bay of Fundy are the highest and most powerful in the world; boats and buildings are high and dry or afloat, twice a day every day. People have adapted buildings with some very interesting underpinnings which must be a nightmare to repair. So much about a place can be guessed at by the buildings and southern Nova Scotia tells a fascinating story.