Advent 3 has arrived and so has winter in Montreal!!!
This past week has seen temperatures dip below -20ºC and snowfalls amounting to over 40cms.Oh my! Quite a change from raking leaves just a couple of weeks ago!The horrible cold coincided with a week in which I was committed to THREE early morning treks to the Brady house and even Wil needed a lot of convincing to leave a warm house at 7am, but we did it, you’ve got to be hardy to live in Québec 😊
Monday evening was the December Day Camp committee meeting. Four of us gathered here in the living room and two other members joined us from a living room in Toronto. We covered a lot of territory, discussing progress on the Program, potential host locations, Team recruiting ideas and of course the Epiphany Team Gathering, coming up on January 6th.Tuesday morning I spent a fair bit of time with follow-up work from our meeting but, in general, office work has slowed down as Christmas approaches. I do hope you read Wednesday Words by Janice, which was published this week; the post includes a lovely photo of Lamb, after whom this blog is named 😊
As so often happens at this season, there have been several visits, this week with friends, some by surprise and others planned ahead. Last evening Jessica and Tyler joined me for dinner a nice way to end off on Friday.This coming Monday there will be a VERY special visit with the Gallaher family who are arriving from the UK tomorrow to spend Christmas with family in the Eastern Townships of Québec. All 6 of them will be joining me for a special Brunch!! It will be a bit tricky as Monday is also a “Brady” morning and I shall only arrive home about half an hour before my guests, not leaving much time to get things cooked. Therefore I’ve booked most of tomorrow afternoon to do prep work both with food and also with table setting etc.
Today began with another round of shovelling but thankfully the sun is now shining so I think the rest of the day can safely be devoted to “Bake & Blog”. My Brunch menu for Monday comes from this month’s Living magazine and will include baked Pear and Raspberry French Toast. The recipe requires a loaf of Challah bread so that is at the top of today’s baking list along with a pie crust for another brunch dish, a tart shell for the dessert at a special dinner coming up next Tuesday, cheese scones for weekday breakfast with Jillian and an Amish Christmas cake. Eek!! It is almost noon already, I think I had better pause this post and get some prep work done on that long list…
Well it’s now after 5pm and the last of the baking is about to come out of the oven. Soon I need to turn my attention to cooking dinner but first we need a recipe.There has been SO much baking and cooking going on around here this week that it is hard to choose but I think I’ll share this Amish Christmas Cake recipe since it is so simple to put together but makes a super good light fruitcake. It also freezes well!
Amish Christmas Cake
- 1 cup chopped pecans
- 2 cups raisins
- 1 cup butter
- 2 cups sugar
- 2 cups water
- 1 tsp. each cinnamon, ground cloves & nutmeg
- 2 Tbsps. each grated orange rind & lemon rind
- 3 ½ cups flour
- n1 tsp. baking soda
Place the first 8 ingredients in a large non-reactive pot, bring to the boil then simmer over medium heat for 5 minutes. Set aside until completely cooled, and then stir in the grated rinds.Preheat the oven to 350º and line a 10” tube pan with greased parchment paper. Whisk together the flour and baking soda. Using an electric mixer set on low speed; slowly blend the flour mixture into the cooled fruits. Pour the batter into the prepared pan and bake for 1 hour or until a tester comes out clean.
Cool in the pan for 15 minutes then turn out onto a cooling rack. Wrap when completely cool and leave one day before slicing.