The 12 Weeks of Christmas-Scotland and Ireland

The 12 Weeks of Christmas-Week 5: Scotland and Ireland

After a break last week because I couldn't smell or taste anything so there was no reason to try new recipes. I'm going much better this week so there was no reason not to! So yesterday and today I tasted the Christmas foods of Scotland and Ireland.

(Source: Britannica.com)

Yesterday I made the dessert and today I made the dinner tonight since I didn't want to do it all in one day. I would definitely call these recipes wins!

First up, is this recipe.

I bought an 8lb. ham but didn't need all of it to try this recipe. I cut up the rest of it and will be enjoying ham dinners for many months to come now! I've never boiled ham before, but it was definitely worth it.

I had to special order plum jam online because no stores I went to carried it. They had all sort of other fancy and weird jams, but plum was never one of them! But this glaze was really amazing. I was highly impressed.

Pre-baking.

Post-baking. This recipe was absolutely delicious and I highly recommend it!

To go with the ham, I decided to try proper Irish roast potatoes, using this recipe.

I had really small potatoes on-hand so I kept them whole.

This was a really easy way to make roast potatoes. Very simple, plain recipe.

Look how pretty they are! The texture is pretty good but I thought there wasn't much flavor, sadly. It needed way more salt. I don't usually do roast russets, I usually do Yukon golds, but these were pretty good.

And for dessert was a Dundee Cake, from Scotland.

This book was a gift from a friend on her trip to Scotland. It was fun to use it for this project!

I won't post the entire recipe here but you can find recipes for it online. It's basically a fruitcake.

The dried fruit mixed with the ground almonds.

Adding the flour and baking powder.

The wet ingredients. Mixed by-hand. Then you add the flour mixed slowly into it and blend well.

Here's the final batter. It is VERY dense!

You will need an off-set spatula to properly smooth the dough into the pan. The recipe said to bake for 2.5-3 hours but it only needed about an hour.

Fresh out of the oven!

And the final product. The fruit is really sweet so you don't need a large piece.

This was a really proper Christmas dinner. We have ham on Christmas Eve in our family and this glaze would be really tasty on it. We aren't having a family Christmas or Christmas Eve this year, because of the pandemic, but I have ham, and leftover plum jam, so I might very well make this again for Christmas Eve dinner! I was really happy with all these recipes and would definitely make any of them again.