Kitchen DIY

Christmas Eve has long been the most magical part of the holiday season for me. (I can’t say always; I was the kid who was up at 3 a.m. on Christmas morning, pacing and watching the clock until the stroke of 7, when I could rouse the rest of the family). For the past few years, I’ve been hosting Christmas Eve dinner at my apartment but this year we decided on a moveable feast and relocated the evening to my mother’s home. We were originally a party of three, then five, and ultimately eight around the table this year. The more the merrier, truly, and the menu changed a bit to accommodate the larger numbers. When it’s only a few, I can indulge in truly ridiculous fussy offerings (ah, the Thanksgiving dinner for three when I made individual puff-pastry cornucopias!) but even I, who make things difficult and complicated for myself as a matter of course, have moments of self-preservation when it comes to choosing recipes.

For this year, I decided on Thomas Keller’s Over-the-Top Mushroom Quiche, a monumental chunk of butter pastry, loads of creamy custard, and a mix of mushrooms baked in a springform pan so that it stands about 3 ½ inches tall. It can also be a bit of a challenge to pull off, although I’ve had several successful runs after my first disastrous attempt. I find solace and helpful guidance, as I so often do, with Deb Perleman’s Smitten Kitchen blog; she, too, had a disaster with her first go-round and she, too, refused to be defeated. A girl after my own heart.

There are several challenges to this quiche. The first is the pastry shell, which is essentially butter held together with a few molecules of flour. Not much structure and the original recipe calls for it to be draped over the ring of springform pan: no base. The first time I made this, I followed the instructions and the bottom of the pre-baked shell immediately dropped off when I began adding the custard and leaked all over. I had, mercifully, put it all on a rimmed baking sheet and ended up pouring the filling into a casserole dish and baking that; a crustless quiche for that Christmas Eve. Good to be equipped with a Plan B from the get-go.

The recipe calls for one pound of white button mushrooms and one pound of oyster. I am lucky to have a vendor at my local farmers’ market, the Mariaville Mushroom Men, who grow the most gorgeous mushrooms. I decided on a mixture of oyster and pioppino mushrooms to add the buttons—fantastic combination! (FYI–I keep the stems and other trimmings from mushrooms in a Ziploc in my freezer to use for mushroom stock when I’ve got enough. Waste not, want not, as Ma Ingalls used to say.)

Should you be up for a challenge and an absolutely delicious payoff, here are some tips (and I encourage you to spend some time with Smitten Kitchen’s odyssey, as well):

• Use the springform base for extra support. And when instructed to leave the hinge open on the ring, leave it open.

• If pre-baking the pastry shell, fill it to the top with weights. I used a combination of Israeli couscous (because they’re small, they spread out nicely to fill the shell) and kidney beans (because they’re good and heavy). It’s all inedible after baking, so I just keep the mixture in a Ziploc bag between baking to re-use.

• It cannot be stressed enough: keep your pastry scraps. After pre-baking the crust, use the scraps to patch any holes or cracks. I thought I had been attentive but, as soon as I started pouring the custard in, I could see alarming leaking. In fact, after announcing that, you could have heard a pin drop in the kitchen while I scooped everything out of the shell to see what had gone wrong. I had give the all clear before conversation resumed.

My solution this time: roll a bead of pastry like caulk and rim the entire crease around the bottom and then wrap the base of the springform pan in foil and crimp it up as tightly as possible to contain the liquid. No more leaking onto the baking sheet although it did leak up the inside of the crust while it baked. I could live with that.

However, despite the trials and tribulations to keep the filling on the inside of the crust where it belonged, the filling itself did not set after the hour and a half of baking time. That’s never happened before, so we had to jack up the heat from 325° to 390° (tented with foil to keep it from burning) for an additional 40 minutes. My mother is getting an oven thermometer to check her oven and see if I can puzzle out what went awry this time if it’s running true. It should have cooled a bit more before we cut it, too, but the guest has already been waiting long enough to eat.

I should have trimmed the crust down closer to the custard, and you can see the ring around the bottom of the quiche where the leaking custard pooled up. But it was delicious.

Because the quiche is so rich, I balanced out all that butter and cream with a farro pilaf with kale and dried cranberries (red and green!) and red cabbage and apple stewed in red wine. It turns out red cabbage at Christmas is a Danish tradition and we had two people of Danish descent, so it looked like I was honoring their traditions when it was total serendipity. The farro recipe comes from a 2011 Vegetarian Times issue and the red cabbage recipe is from Anna Thomas’s New Vegetarian Epicure and can be found here. Both are easy, pretty on the plate, and done in advance.

For dessert I decided on a Bûche de Noël, a French cake shaped like a Yule log. It did seem that a cake, tart, or pie was the way to go to serve eight. I combined parts from different recipes. Because I knew I was going with a chocolate ganache frosting (brown for tree bark, mais oui?), I wanted the cake sponge itself to be somewhat light. Again into the Vegetarian Times archives, I used their modified angel food sponge from December 2012 that cut down on some of the fat and calories; it’s mostly egg whites and it’s gluten-free, using almond flour. The ganache and filling, an espresso-mascarpone cream, are both from Cook’s Illustrated Bittersweet Chocolate Roulade.

The cake makes for a pretty spiffy presentation although is not in itself difficult to make. The sponge is mostly egg whites whipped to medium peaks than spread into a parchment-lined jelly roll pan or rimmed baking sheet, baked until golden (about 15 minutes), cooled slightly then inverted onto a kitchen towel, parchment removed, and then the cake is rolled up with the towel while it’s still warm so that it cools in the correct shape. After the cake is cooled, it’s unrolled, towel removed (judging from comments, that’s not always apparent to some bakers), filling spread, and then re-rolled.

I wrapped it in parchment and plastic wrap at this point and transported it in this state, leaving the frosting and decorating for later. The ends are sliced off at an angle and placed against the cake to make it look more log-like and frosted with chocolate ganache. Some drag the tines of a fork across the frosting for a bark-like effect but my frosting is so far from smooth I figured that would do. Sometimes confectioner’s sugar is dusted across the cake to look like snow but I kept with the mushroom theme and made some meringue mushrooms, which are both traditional decorations and also delicious on their own. Mine weren’t as professional as many I’ve seen but they were good enough. Egg whites are whipped into very stiff peaks for this. I don’t have a pastry bag (that will change, I’m sure) so I just shoveled them into a plastic food storage bag, snipped off the corner and used that to pipe the mushroom caps and my best attempt at stems. They are baked in a low oven for an hour and half or so, left in the oven with the heat off until cool, then assembled by poking a hole in the underside of the cap, smearing a little ganache or melted chocolate in the hole, and fitting in a stem tip. Leave to dry for a bit then arrange. I dusted some with some cocoa powder for a little variation.

Besides the dessert, none of this menu is specific to Christmas but I thought it brought together elements of the season, both of the holiday and the world outside, certainly here in the northeastern US. It also brought together a gathering of people who wouldn’t ordinarily be in each other’s company, joined by camaraderie and good cheer despite kitchen travails, with the tree alight, candles on the table and in the windows, and a fire burning in the fireplace. There is a reason that light is so integral to the celebrations of December, and that’s what I love most about Christmas Eve. There is something about gathering together and throwing light against the darkness outside, both in a real and metaphorical sense. It feels like we could all use a little more of that in these times. The days are growing longer a little more each day; seed catalogues are arriving to begin thinking spring and new growth; we can bring more warmth and kindness to the world in our own individual actions. Wishing you all a peaceful, healthy holiday season and 2019.