Teenage Mutant Hero Turtles. Tracy Island. Buzz Lightyear. A great Christmas tradition is the goose chase for that elusive gift. This year I kind of experienced that tradition, but if I am Arnold Schwarzenegger in Jingle All The Way then my chase was not a Turboman figure for my son to make up for being a crappy father (and to steer him off a path towards the darkside), but rather Heston Blumenthal’s mince pies dusted with pine-scented sugar for the purposes of writing an irreverent blogpost about them.
To be fair, ‘chase’ is a bit of an exaggeration – I visited the Waitrose in Nottingham three times in the space of a week, and was hardly willing to venture outside the city for this sole purpose. On the first visit I was confronted by an empty shelf, but thereafter there was no sign that these mince pies were ever on sale (there was an absence of an absence if you will.) Where had the pies gone? Had the proposition of an authentic pine forest fragrance struck such a cord with the middle classes? Or had they been withdrawn over fears that they were laced with traces of norovirus? I guess we may never know (or never care to know).
A contributing factor in my inability to obtain the pies may have been that we, the people of Nottingham, are deemed worthy of only a little Waitrose, which is not my description of the size of the store but it’s actual branding, complete with ‘little’ beginning in lower case and presented in a smaller font. This branding is so disgustingly twee, I find it possibly even harder to stomach than the suggestion that a small Sainsbury’s imbues a sense of localism.
Having failed to obtain Heston’s pies, I suppose I could have followed Blue Peter’s Tracy Island lead, and attempt to make my own, but I would think Heston’s skillset is many levels above Anthea Turner’s. Given Heston’s usual wackiness, I expect the sheets of pastry are made using an industrial press, the pies are soldered together and cooked alongside a body in a crematorium. The one element I would’ve had no problem with would’ve been the pine-scented sugar – I’m sure submerging a pine air freshener in a bowl of icing sugar would’ve sufficed. Passing off mine own pies as Heston’s is the sort of fraudulent behaviour that could’ve got this blog investigated by blogging regulator Ofblog.
I had no such problem in tracking down Christmas cake from Delia, the second most beloved celebrity on the Norwich City board (here fraternising, or perhaps sororising, with another team’s sponsor.) And yet Delia actually does force you down the Blue Peter route. Intended to retail at £10, she just offers up a bunch of prepared and measured ingredients, and expects you to make the cake yourself. For that price I’d rather get the fucking cake. Perhaps by measuring the ingredients for you she feels she is taking the misery out of making a cake. Well maybe I like the measurey, Dels.
What's in the box: insufficient ingredients for a Christmas cake
The box actually only contains some of the ingredients. While you get flour, sugar, treacle, mixed spice, chopped almonds and a dried fruit mix soaked in brandy, you have to provide in addition 5 eggs, butter, a lemon and an orange. That is without the apricot jam, Armagnac/brandy, marzipan, icing, icing sugar and silver balls to decorate the ruddy thing. Miffed, I decided to make the sod-the-icing version.
The cooking instructions suggest you surround your mixture with about 37 layers of baking paper (okay, 2 really) and practically insist that if you so much as take a peek at the cake within the first 4 hours of it being in the oven then Christmas will inevitably be ruined. Being teetotal, I ignored the demand that, post-bake I ‘feed’ the cake with Armagnac or brandy (I mean, what am I going to do with the rest of a bottle Armagnac or brandy?) As it was, the dried fruit seemed to have been soaked in so much brandy that, for me, eating a slice was tantamount to binge drinking.
Really, therein lies the problem with for me with this cake. So strongly alcholic is its flavour, that my taste buds are not sufficiently sophisticated to differentiate this flavour from a brandy of a lower/higher quality. Delia claims the cake has been “an absolute winner with everyone” over the last 40 years. A statement as strong as the brandy. I shall have to remember to contact her so that next year it reads “an absolute winner with everyone, except Ed Knock”. I’m sure she would oblige.
Delia's Christmas cake: sod the icing edition
Merry Christmas, you filthy animals!
This piece has been cross-posted at Zeitgeist Tapes, a blog summarising the week in popular culture, by good friend of Cuizine, Ellie. Go check it out!
