Hercule Poirot's Christmas
Cooking With Christie: Outtake
The maraschino stage in my quest to make candied cherries!
Cooking With Christie: A New To Me Holiday Spice Cookie
This Week’s Bake: Kruidnoten
Inspiration: I ran across a cookbook I couldn’t resist — Dark Rye And Honey Cake: Festival Baking from Belgium, the Heart of the Low Countries. Not only does it contain instructions for fourteen distinct waffles, five different pretzels, and three separate pancakes….
It contains this little gem of a recipe for kruidnoten.
A spiced cookie popular during Saint Nicholas festivities in Belgium and the Netherlands — it also goes year-round, in my opinion, with coffee time.
Interestingly these tiny cookies contain no eggs. They also require quite a bit of kneading to bring them together, and once that step’s finished, the dough needs to rest in the fridge overnight. A feature that makes them perfect in my eyes, as I love making a dough one day and baking on the next!
They also require a couple of spices which one may or may not have on hand — including cinnamon, cloves, ginger, nutmeg, allspice, cardamom, coriander, mace, and long pepper. According to the recipe, the long pepper can be substituted with any peppercorn you’ve got on hand — but the mace proved a tad challenging to find (I ended up ordering it off the interwebs).
But these suckers were worth the effort! Spectacularly crunchy, without the threat of breaking a tooth, they go really well with coffee. And since each of mine only weighed about 8 oz (which was a tad big according to the recipe), dipping one in my morning brew didn’t fill me with guilt!
Christie: I cannot wait to make these during the holidays! Most especially since I finally made something I am certain Poirot would enjoy!
BTW: Dark Rye And Honey Cake: Festival Baking from Belgium, the Heart of the Low Countries, is a gorgeous cookbook. And it does more than just list recipes. Our author Regula Ysewijn gives us the history of the bakes, why and when they are important, great instructions (in cups and grams), and awesome pictures!
Cooking With Christie! Bread Pudding
Inspiration: In a fit of ‘waste not want not’ my husband and I decided to make bread pudding after a loaf of bread I’d baked turned out utterly wonky. And by wonky, I mean the seam split from the main body of the bread loaf, and one side was substantially larger than the other…However, when cut into small one-inch cubes, the bread’s lop-sidedness disappeared!
(Who would’ve thunk it….)
Ree Drummond on the Food Network site wrote the base recipe we used. Though, predictably, we made a couple of changes….
The problem with Bread Pudding, for me, is the texture — or the lack thereof — so my husband had the idea of putting a crumble on top made with cinnamon (1tsp.), butter (2Tsp.), flour (1/4c), and brown sugar (1/4c). And when all I wanted to do was eat the sweet, crunchy topping? Well, we sliced the remaining pan full into one-inch thick strips, turned them onto their sides, made more streusel topping, coated the lot, and baked it again until golden brown.
The concoction was terrific! Even better? With the topping, it actually had texture!
Christie: Honestly, I can see Miss Marple making this for the same reason, especially during WWII (or after, as the habits formed during this period still inform decisions today), as the dessert is a tasty and economical one!
Cooking With Christie!
This Week’s Recipe: Baguettes
Inspiration: I had a hankering for bread that could sop up soup broth. So I started flipping thru my Ankarsrum cookbook and found the baguette recipe.
Shockingly, I didn’t change anything!
(There’s a first time for everything.)
Other than perhaps needing to twist the dough a bit more (a technique I’d never applied before) the bread turned out perfectly and was exactly what I was looking for!
Christie: Now after a bit more practice – I think even Poirot would eat my baguettes!
Cooking With Christie: Duivekater
Cooking With Christie!
This Week’s Recipe: Duivekater
So I was flipping thru my baking books and ran across this gem. I mean who wouldn’t want to bake a loaf of bread that’s supposed to resemble a shin bone (in lieu of real of sacrificing an animal) to protect against the devil during the holidays!
This is my very first attempt at baking this loaf, and it turned out ok. (I need a better pastry brush to paint it with egg so the shine is even.) In any case, it’s a tasty loaf that lends itself to french toast due to the spices flavoring it.
DO NOT put it in the toaster.
Ask me how I know.
Due to the amount of sugar (and I suspect the egg wash due to the char marks) even on the lowest toaster setting – the slice turns into a charcoal briquette…quickly.
Here’s the book that supplied me with the recipe:
Christie: I can see Poirot enjoying a slice of this bread. (If created by a defter hand than my own.) The hint of lemon, spices and slightly macabre I think would appeal to the Belgian.
My 52 Weeks With Christie 
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