Baking Recipes - Tumblr Posts

Hi friends! Just a day after this years Yule and a few days out from Christmas, regardless of what you celebrate during this winter months, we're gonna be cooking a tangy tango between two traditional english staples-

Yule Plum Pudding and Wassail from Lord of the Rings Online!

(You can find the cooking instructions and full ingredient list under the break-)

MY NAMES CROSS NOW LETS COOK LIKE ANIMALS

SO, “what goes in to this Yule Plum Pudding?” YOU MAY ASKPlum Pudding is not a "pudding" as us americans think of it; its closer to a fruitcake but less shit.

Cranberries

White raisins

Macerated prunes (in brandy)

Chopped candied peel

Blanched almonds

All-purpose flour

Cinnamon

Nutmeg

Cloves

Sugar

Breadcrumbs

Lemon zest

Unsalted butter

Eggs

Whole milk

Half a bottle of brandy

It also doesnt contain any capital-P plums! it actually does contain plums im so fucking stupid i never connected the dots that prunes were dried plums oh my god. But they still ued any dried fruit, and "Plum" here is just referring to any dried fruit. And what about the birth of todays wassail?

4 cooking apples

2 pears

Brown sugar

Cinnamon sticks

2 lemons

A bottle of sherry

The other half bottle of brandy

Wassail is very similar to apple cider drank in the fall, with a few differences like the addition of pears and different alcohol source. It was commonly drank while "wassailing" which was a Yuletide predecessor to christmas carolling. People would go door-to-door with a big bowl of wassail, play music, and give well wishes- offering drinks from the wassail in return for small gifts!

AND, “what does Yule Plum Pudding and Wassail taste like?” YOU MIGHT ASK

The puddings like a fruitcake but if a fruit cake tasted good and wasnt a brick

Its thick and rich, and somehow actually tastes like plum despite that not being intended or making sense

I love the macerated prunes so much. Juicy berries to forage for. Enrichment

The icings reminiscent of buttercream but more savory than sweet

The wassail is like drinking the golden edges off the clouds at sunset

Its got a little bit of the dryness from the sherry that makes your mouth water the moment you stop drinking it

You just want to keep drinking more to sate yourself

Even without eggs its surprisingly full bodied and thick

I had to make a few substitutions from traditional elements due to either being not available or too expensive, but with a little problem-solving nothing was too hard to do.

. Used a bundt cake pan instead of a pudding tin .  Suet (animal fat) was historically used for plum pudding. I couldnt find any and used butter instead . Used golden delicious apples when called for . Used concorde pears when called for . Some wassail recipes fold in egg whites before serving, to make the drink creamier. I didnt do this, but if you do, the recommendation to drink it fresh still stands (and strongly)

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I gotta admit, I was nervous approaching this recipe. Not only because I didn't own and couldnt find a "pudding tin" without ordering online, or because the concept of steaming a pastry(?) feels foreign and odd, but also because of how old and storied this dish is. You always run into the issue with historical foods who date back to the times where oral history was the only history. The issue of people being combative that their recipe is the only true variant of the recipe, and all the others are mucking the whole thing up.

Its good to remember that like with most dishes, cooking is something that evolved and continues to evolve overtime. Unless someones trying to rewrite history and claim that ants on a log is a creme brule in which case you should run them over with a '98 Pontiac Sunfire.

Theres a few things I'd do differently when cooking again, like chopping the blanched almonds. They were a bit too big when left whole. And adding some amount of heavy cream to the icing? Maybe? To give it a fluffier/milkier feel? But the proces of cooking itself was very straightforward and I have no real complaints or modifications to make. When having leftovers of the pudding it did seem to "mature" and taste better and better the more days i kept it in the fridge, so thats something to keep in mind! But it tastes great a day after all the same.

I give this recipe a solid 10/10 (with 1 being food that makes one physically sick and 10 being food that gives one a lust for life again.) Happy winter everyone! Congrats to another year of staying alive!

🐁 ORIGINAL RESIPPY TEXT BELOW 🐁

Yule Plum Pudding Ingredients:

16oz cranberries

12oz white raisins

9oz macerated prunes

4oz chopped candied peel (any fruit)

2oz blanched, chopped almonds

4oz all-purpose flour

Measure spices with your heart (cinnamon, nutmeg, and cloves)

8oz granulated sugar

8oz fresh white breadcrumbs

lemon zest (one lemon)

4oz grated unsalted butter

4 eggs

8oz whole milk

Pudding Icing Ingredients:

1½oz unsalted butter

1½oz all-purpose flour

10½oz whole milk

3oz granulated sugar

2 tablespoons brandy

Yule Plum Pudding Method:

A week before making, macerate your prunes in brandy.

Mix together all the dried fruit, peel, and almonds. Sieve flour and spices together then add to the fruit mixture along with the sugar, breadcrumbs, rind, and grated butter.

Beat eggs and then blend with 8oz of milk.

Stir the egg/milk mixture to incorporate into the dry ingredients. Add prunes, and stir some more.

Put batter into a well-buttered pudding basin, with parchment paper to cover.

Get a large pot and place a kitchen towel or something similar at the bottom- then place the pudding basin on top of the towel, inside the large pot.

Fill the outer pot with water until it’s halfway up the side, cover the pot with a lid (or foil).

Steam on the stovetop at 210f for 4-6 hours depending on size of pudding basin. If the water gets too low, add a bit more.

After steaming, uncover and allow to cool to room temperature. Do not remove it from the pudding basin! Cover with fresh parchment paper and foil and store in a cool, dry place for at least a day.

(optional) to reheat; steam for 40-80 minutes, until warmed through.

Pudding Icing Method:

Place butter in a medium saucepan with the flour, pour in the milk then whisk everything vigorously together over a medium heat.

As soon as it comes to simmering point and has thickened, turn the heat to its lowest setting, stir in the sugar, and let the sauce cook for 10 minutes.

Add the brandy and stir to mix. Keep warm until required.

Wassail Ingredients:

4 cooking apples

2 pears

Brown sugar

4 Cinammon sticks

2 lemon

1 bottle of Sherry

½ bottle of Brandy

Wassail Method:

Core the apples and pears, leave the rest intact, and set in a baking pan. Fill the hollow centers with brown sugar.

Add about an inch of water to the pan and bake at 350f for 30 minutes, or until the fruit is soft.

Move the fruit to a large pot, add a bottle of sherry, half a bottle of brandy, lemon peel, and 4 large cinnamon sticks. (Feel free to use less booze!)

Bring the pot to a simmer for about 45 minutes, stirring occasionally. Strain before serving!

This is not a recipe blog. But have some cake and also what I thought about while I made it.

Spiced Apple Bundt Cake(s)

Cake Ingredients:

3 medium apples, chopped

1 c. maple syrup

3 eggs

3/4 c. brown sugar (I used dark)

1/2 c. butter, softened 

1 Tbsp vanilla

3 c. flour

1 1/2 tsp baking powder 

1 1/2 tsp baking soda

1/2 tsp fine sea salt

1 Tbsp cinnamon

1/2 tsp ground nutmeg

1/2 tsp ground ginger

1/4 tsp ground allspice 

(Optional) 1 c. chopped walnuts 

Icing Ingredients: (will make more icing than you need so maybe half this unless you want extra) 

1 c. powdered sugar

1/4 c. milk

8 oz cream cheese

2 Tbsp vanilla

pinch of cinnamon and nutmeg as desired 

Instructions:

For the cake, begin by mixing the apples, maple syrup, eggs, sugar, butter, and vanilla. (Bold Ingredients) In a mixer the apple bits may jump out of the mixer so cover it with a towel or duck!

Mix all the other cake ingredients together and add into the apple mixture. 

Grease your Bundt pan really well. Bake a full cake for 1 hour at 350F or mini Bundt cakes for 45 minutes. Overfill the mini Bundt cake pan a bit so that the icing can sit inside the cake. 

For the icing mix all the ingredients together. Ideally, it is a little bit goopy so you can fill the mini Bundt cakes but also get a good drip to make it pretty. 

This cake is also awesome with caramel sauce. 

Hey everyone, now that we have cake, want to know a fun fact? Much like the way that this bundt cake is just okay without the apples and the apples are just apples without the cake, Today we get to have this wonderful combination of apples and cake AND either caramel or cream cheese icing (or both if you’re feeling saucy), and we get to think about lichens. 

What’s a lichen, you may ask? Or you may not ask, because you already know, or because you are not interested, and in that case you can skip this bit and just think about cake. But for those of you still here, a lichen is, in its simplest form, a symbiotic relationship between an algae and a fungus, with the fungus providing structure and protection and the algae providing extra food with the ability to photosynthesize. Lichens grow on rocks and trees and pretty much anywhere else, and are among the very first organisms that colonize a place after a disaster such as a forest fire or a volcanic eruption. Because of this they are often called pioneer organisms, and they are able to persist in environments far harsher than post-volcanic wastelands. In fact, the poster child of natural resilience, the tardigrade, looks like an absolute wimp when compared to some species of lichen, which can withstand several orders of magnitude more radiation than our dear little water bears. Lichen are resistant to many kinds of damage, and there are several species of lichen whose presence can be used as a surrogate to determine the overall air quality in a region. 

But wait, you say, back up. Species of lichen? Didn’t you just say that a lichen is two separate organisms? How can a lichen be a species? Would you list a great white shark and her loyal remora as a single species? Of course not. While they both benefit from their symbiotic partnership, they are also perfectly capable of existing separately. Such is not the case for many species of lichen, which have spent so long living in tandem that the individual fungi and algae can no longer live apart. Thus, a single lichen is classified as a species, and not two individuals. 

This is what is beautiful about the humble lichen. It can look like nothing but a dusting of greenish powder, or it can hang off of trees in curtains. It can be sent to space, frozen, boiled, and irradiated, and will rebound faster than anything else even where disaster has devastated an area. However, take those two individuals apart and they may well falter and fail under the same stressors just like everything else. And just so, everything in the world will struggle on its own without the support of another. Lichen builds the communities we thrive in, and in itself is a tiny community, proving every day, in every corner of the world and beyond, that we are stronger together. 

Thanks for the idea, @vroom-shroom, and thanks for helping me make everything a two person job.