Food Adventures: Christmas Dinner

Merry Christmas! 'Tis the season to put unprecedented effort into a one off gluttonous meal with your nearest and dearest! I felt particularly festive this year, I'd even put up the tree early (none of my usual put-up-the-tree-3-days-before-Xmas malarkey)! Naturally, I had to insist on a Christmas meal! I wanted to just buy some ready to roast meat from the supermarket but mum ended up buying some slabs of raw meat so I just let her deal with the meat whilst I made the cake and side dishes. Everyone knows that mothers hold the secret knowledge of how to perfectly roast meat so I was not about to mess with this age old tradition. I was inspired to make a red velvet roulade after watching a video on youtube so I was absolutely set on making my own. I'm happy with the way it ended up looking but to be honest, I didn't like the taste... There are few reasons this could be due to but I will get round to that... For now, please admire my highly instagram-worthy red velvet roulade along with my glorious tree with its tacky tacky ornaments! I think we've had these ornaments since my parents moved to England some 20 years ago, they will probably soon count as antiques. Overall, Christmas dinner was a success, even if my cake did end up tasting funny...

Like my other Food Adventure post, I'm just going to guide you through my cooking process and reveal all my fails along the way. The first thing I did was make the bacon bits to sprinkle on my hasselback potatoes. All I did was chop 2 slices of bacon into tiny pieces and then fried them dry in a frying pan.

Glorious bacon *salivate*

I set the bacon bits aside on top of a piece of kitchen towel to drain the fat. So much fat. Hello clogged arteries.

Dat glorious saturated fat.

I actually wanted to rest after making the bacon bits but luckily some sixth sense compelled me to start baking the cake. Thank goodness I sort of autopiloted into making the cake because there's no way we would have been able to eat that cake at dinner time if I'd started any later... I was actually using some Betty Crocker red velvet cake mix for the roulade. It's cheating, I know, but the recipes for red velvet I'd seen online needed red food colouring and buttermilk. We have no red food colouring and buying some was too much commitment for this cake. Also UK doesn't have buttermilk so I thought cake mix would do the trick... 

I looked online and some sites recommended some "hacks" to make box cake mix taste like homemade so I replaced the water with milk, vegetable oil with butter, and added an extra egg to create more moisture. the batter looked pretty legit so I thought this would be fine. >.>

Red velvet batter looking pretty legit.

The night before, I'd made some moldable icing to make my own holly leaves. I'd found a recipe for the moldable icing but the quantities were way too much so I ended up trying to halve the amounts but then decided to use less butter... so in reality, I just winged this. ^^" This is what food adventures are all about! *Shakes fist*

I had a small slab of butter left in the butter pot so I just used that... No idea how much it was... Oh well! I added the cream and vanilla extract, then gradually added icing sugar until the frosting became a kneadable ball. I tried to keep track of how much icing sugar I added but after adding food colouring, the "dough" became too wet so I ended up having to continually add icing so it was futile.

The ball of moldable icing turned out to be too big still I halved the ball before adding the food colouring and saved the rest for future use. I only had normal green food colouring (not gel) so the colour didn't turn out like a deep viridian as I'd hoped, more a minty green. Nevertheless, they were passable as hollies!

I separated my green dough into six and then rolled them into teardrop shapes. Then, I pinched at the edges to create the pointed edges and flattened them into holly shapes you see here! I didn't have any red food colouring but we did have some red writing icing from a Christmas chocolate decorating set from ages ago so I just used that. Yup, it was way past its expiry date but we all know that stuff never goes off due to all the preservatives! The tube of writing icing wouldn't "pipe" out but mum told me to put it in hot water so that it melts a bit. After putting it in its water bath, it piped out much easier! I just rolled the writing icing into little balls and stuck them onto the leaves with some water.

Minty green holly leaves >.>

Moving on from that tangent, I poured my cake batter into the lined swiss roll tin and baked it for 10 minutes. The box says to bake for 25 minutes but because I used half the batter, I thought I would follow the original red velvet roulade instructions for 10 minutes. I feel like maybe this is the point where problems began with my cake...

Looking legit.

I punctured the cake with a skewer to see if it was really fully cooked after 10 minutes and I didn't have any wet batter on the skewer so it was cooked properly! It also looked delicious and cooked properly so I don't know why it ended up with such a flat texture... I need a baking saviour :( Anyways, I took the cake out of the tin when it was a bit cooler and rolled it up so that the cake wouldn't crack when I rolled it after filling it with cream. It seemed like everything had gone to plan but when I actually tried to unroll it after cooling, lo and behold, it cracked -.-"

Still looks legit, the skewer test also said it was fully baked!

Next, it was time to deal with the cream cheese frosting. I was pretty much expecting the frosting to suck because there wasn't any real cream cheese at the supermarket so we had to buy the fat-free alternative. I was expecting a sloppy, wet mess. Nevertheless, mum dug out her piping syringe. I asked for a piping bag but she gave me this next level contraption!

Super groovy piping syringe

I tried to follow this recipe for cream cheese frosting. My frosting was doomed from the start because, apart from not having the proper cream cheese, I didn't have enough cream. I was hoping that I could wing it like the moldable icing (which turned out very well) but alas, it was not to be...

I had 3/4 of a tub left of double cream so I just used it all... I followed some internet advice which said to chill the bowl and whisk attachments for better whipped cream and the whipped cream turned out very nice! It took about 9 minutes overall to whip the cream to stiff peaks (useful info!) So far so good. I put my whipped cream in the fridge whilst I dealt with the "cream cheese" part. 

3/4 tub of cream. The missing 1/4 was drizzled on many nutella mug cakes.

Stiff peaks, yay!

So, time to blend the cream cheese. Except, I only had quark. What even is quark??? I've never heard of this dairy product before, I thought quarks were supposed to be the smallest things in the universe? Not some fat free disappointment of cream cheese??? Even when you google quark, it tells you about the particles that are smaller than protons and electrons. Anyway, the quark was more sturdy than I imagined so I didn't need to drain it over night to make it stiffer. I blended it with vanilla extract and icing sugar and a bit of lemon juice. Now, I'd read online that adding lemon juice to quark frosting and cream cheese frosting made it extra nice. This was a lie. It ended up tasting like yoghurt, which I really do not like... I then thought we wouldn't have enough frosting so I used up the rest of the quark in the hopes of drowning out the acidity of the lemon and juice and to bulk up the frosting. Also we had no other use for quark, so I thought lets just use it up and hope for the best.

I gradually folded the quark into the cream. At first, the cream balanced out the yoghurt flavour but then I got carried away and put too much quark-urt in so my frosting turned yoghurt flavoured T_T Still, it looked pipeable so I stuck it back in the fridge in the hopes of stiffening it up just a tad.

Damn Quark.

When I checked on my rolled up red velvet roulade, the rolled part was kind of damp and sticky... I'm not really sure what happened but my guess is condensation. It was too late to turn back now so I just frosted and rolled up the cake again and used the frosting as make-shift cake-cement for the gaps where the cake broke off.

Slightly broken but still looks legit.

Next, I stuffed the frosting into the piping syringe and covered the exterior of the roll. This was super messy because the syringe's lid would not close because I'd gotten the cream all over the ridges so I ended up having to just hold the lid on and pray to sweet baby Jesus that it wouldn't come loose and explode everywhere. Also, I just realised this is some dodgy phallic imagery going on with this piping syringe O_O.

Piping syringe a.k.a. Mess Gun

After finishing frosting the cake, I started on my side dishes. I made honey roast root vegetables and Hasselback potatoes. I don't have much to say about these because they're pretty easy to make and they didn't fail so... we'll just skim past.

Can't go wrong with roasting veggies with a honey glaze.

Took ages to make all the little slices in the potatoes but worth it! Also, I may
have accidentally cut off a few slices because of my noob cutting skills but I
just shoved them back in the gap and pretended nothing happened.
Also this sack of potatoes cost 39p! So cheap what the heck???

The Hasselback potatoes with a sprinkling of bacon bits and cheese! NOM

Just before serving dinner, I added the holly leaves to my roulade. I was worried the heavy icing hollies would sink into that frosting and slide down if I added it too early so I waited until it was photo time!

To be honest, the roulade looked pretty good but tasted prettyyyy horrid. I feel like I can blame the cake mix though because even though the texture turned out weird, it still shouldn't have affected the taste much... The frosting tasted like yoghurt and I couldn't get over that... Dammit internet with your citrus-y lies! Maybe cream cheese frosting doesn't end up tasting like yoghurt if you have enough of the proper ingredients trololol. Anyways, next time I'll just follow the original recipe for the roulade har har har.

It's not the inside that counts as long as it looks good amirite?? >.> (a.k.a.
lessons from Disney movies.)

Our meal was very nice! Mum's roast beef came out cooked perfectly (see, the mum and roasts thing is REAL) and the pork was crispy and juicy. My honey roasted vegetables were of course delicious (because you can do no wrong with honey roast veg) and the hasselback potatoes were sooo good! I think they weren't that crispy though because they'd cooled down a bit before we started eating (ok, I'm sorry I had to take a lot of photos >.<). The mulled wine was also veryyy nice, love mulled wine during Christmas!

I guess our main Christmas meal was a success but my ambitious dessert was a bit of a dud... I know, baking is a science so winging it is not a good option. Next time, I shall succeed! 

Our meal all together! The beef tray had a lot of cooled fat O_O

With my masterpiece! I'm proud of it but also don't want to eat it loooool.

Cheers! Merry Christmas with Mama and Papa!