There. I’ve said it and I feel better already. 

  

Now don’t get me wrong- I like a bit of external stimuli as much as the next woman. But in the kitchen that runs no further than the ipod affixed semi-permanently to my head. Not to an over-eager pre-pubescent with very gummy fingers. Theoretically, the only forms of life I can countenance behind the stove with me are a handful of Huntsman spiders and maybe a decent kitchen hand or two. The former because they keep all that menacing Australian vermin at bay (and I say ‘theoretical’ here because these arachnids - hairy things the size of a small rodent - are best appreciated In The Abstract. I don’t actually want to see one). And the latter because a couple of pot washers'd be handy for dealing with my squalor. Ideally, these guys would need to be deaf-mute for the relationship to work well so I'm thinking this is a purely notional idea that, unlike the Huntsman, is never likely to have legs. 

  

I realize that in terms of post-modern parenting this defines me as hopelessly inadequate. If not vaguely psychopathic. Insisting that my kid watch Scooby Doo reruns when he’d much rather be stirring the pot with mum is doubtless inviting no end of resentments that will require expensive professional intervention at some point in his later life. The problem is that I simply can’t talk, think, cook, afford protection from burning substances and weld a lethally sharp cook’s knife (or some other cutting instrument) all at the same time. Throw an overly-energetic, chatter-box of a 7 year old into the kitchen mix and you’ve got a recipe for disaster, not dinner. 

  

But my gorgeous son now has enough powers of recall to know that every year, in time for Christmas, I whip up dozens of decorated gingerbread biscuits to tie on to the tree. I make these because I can’t bear to let any of the usual sparkly Christmas ephemera loose in my house. Nor can I afford the tasteful Lalique or Wedgewood alternatives. And there aren’t too many other occasions in life that allow for a girl to slosh artificial blue food colouring around with gay abandon and the Culinary Anarchist in me loves nothing more than doing just that. 

  

Decorating the Christmas cookies is arguably the most Martha-esque activity I engage in all year. It’s pathetic really but I get quite a kick from seeing all those neatly shaped hearts and stars and trees and whatnot lined up on  wire cooling racks, awaiting their first application of icing. By the time they’re painted up, the piping bag has done its’ worst  and (gasp) the ribbons are in place, I’m practically bursting out of my gingham pinny with pride and achievement. Naturally my young ‘un wants to help. Hell- who wouldn’t? Good, clean fun doesn't come any better than this; cow-pat shapes of dark, spice-infused dough, a few rolling pins, some bowls of pastel coloured sugar glaze and jars of assorted, shiny decorative items all assembled in a confined space is a tantalizing concept for most anyone. Let alone a hyped-up juvenile with under-developed motor skills and a penchant for smearing walls. Maybe I’m unnecessarily alarmist but I sense way too much potential for carnage in this. Blue, pink and green carnage. 

  

I use the same gingerbread recipe every year as I’m too stuck in my ways to veer from what I know will work.  It’s one I developed for a magazine and for the life of me I cant recall what I based it on. But  I know I re-jigged it from somewhere- despite what you might believe about food writers, most of our recipes are ultimately derived from ones that exist already. I wish I could say we’re so terribly clever that we just muse deep into our navels and The Universe reveals to us completely fresh incarnations of the chocolate cake or the marshmallow or the roast lamb dinner. But  we’re not and it doesn't.   

  

Much of the time, we adapt, tweak, hone and fiddle around with some one else's recipe  until we've put in place sufficient structural changes to keep the intellectual property lawyers at bay. It's bothering me that I can't recall the inspiration for my gingerbread as I like to give credit where its' due. So I embark on an mission to find it and you'd think I was searching for the source of the bloody Nile. I'm unearthing books that haven't seen the light of day in decades and the attendant dust storms are hampering commuter visibility up and down my street. Naturally I hone in on the Americans here. While we all know they've made a right botch of the global balance of power and they really suck at international team sports, those Yankees truly know a thing or two about baking. Think about it. It if weren't for the Americans we probably wouldn't have brownies, cup cakes, angel food cake, doughnuts, snickerdoodles or New York Cheesecake and wouldn't we all be far lesser mortals for that? 

  

It's true that many of these sweet classics were appropriated from immigrant cooking traditions and aren't actually American at all; the Germans were the real brains behind the doughnut for example. And gingerbread biscuits too for that matter. But as one who makes her living from derivation and borrowing (culinarily speaking) I say-  good on those Yanks for pinching a few nifty ideas and running with them. It's our gain they're a nation besotted with home baking; they've given us baking authors of superior calibre. Like Greg Patent, Susan Purdy, Emily Luchetti, Martha Stewart, Rose Levy Barenbaum, Carole Bloom, Carole Walter, Nancy Baggett, Regan Daly and Nick Malgieri. I'm thumbing through their various books now in hopeful pursuit of the recipe that  parented mine  ... and all I'm drawing is blanks. Most of them have recipes for gingerbread (or some sort of other, spiced Christmassy biscuit)  but none bear terribly close resemblance to my own tried-and-true. Hmmm. Maybe The Universe spoke to me after all. 

  

Flicking through these books, many of them utterly sumptuous in design and typography, reminds me why I hardly ever cook from them. Most of them annoy me. Books I work on have to include not just cup measures but British and American weight conversions in the ingredient list as well - and any food editor worth their salt will tell you what a hassle this is. Not to mention the mess it makes of clean, modern, easy-on-the-eye lay-outs. But we Aussies do it because we care about our overseas reader. We want them to be able to cook with ease from a book written in a part of the world far from theirs where the cup and tablespoon measures, like the paper money and approach to foreign policy, bear little resemblance to their own. But in the best spirit of American jingoism, most of their books only express weights in American cup measures. No gram or ounce conversions are generally bothered with and this can spell disaster for the unwary Antipodean. For example, the American cup of flour mostly weighs 125g whereas ours is 150g . If you don' t own electronic scales for conjuring accurate conversions, you're screwed. And you can't assume authors are all on the same page with this stuff either, hence the pointed 'mostly.' Squinting to read the weeny print on the conversion charts hidden deep in the bowels of Carole Blooms' The Essential Baker (Wiley, New Jersey, 2007) nearly cost me my eyesight. But amidst the migraine-inducing clutter of charts, numbers and words I caught that her cup of flour weighs 145g (unsifted). Now I'm really antagonised. If a nation is going to make strong claims - such as how much flour it believes to be hiding inside a full measuring cup -  the very least it can do is come out with a unified front.  Wars have been started over less. 

  

 I accept that Americans aren't writing their books for anyone but themselves. But while I'm in full-blown rant mode, I may as well keep going and consider the fraught subject of the 'stick of butter'. Heaven knows I've wanted to for years. I don't know about you but my butter doesn't come in 'sticks' so how am I meant to know what the thing weighs? I turn to Martha in full expectation of enlightenment..In her Baking Handbook (Clarkson Potter, New York, 2005), there's a one page conversion chart concealed right down the bum end of  things that turns out to be nothing more than pure tokenism. In her defense I'd say this chart seems to be Standard Issue in American publishing circles as Carole Walter (Great Cookies, Clarkson Potter, New York, 2003), bless her, uses more or less the same one. "One stick (of butter)" it explains, " is the equivalent of 8 tablespoons. One tablespoon of butter is therefore the equivalent to 1/2 ounce /15 grams" . As one who flunked School Cert Maths I can be pretty dim when it comes to numerical concepts so maybe I missed something here. That 'therefore' threw me.  I'm not getting this direct relationship between the stick of butter and the tablespoon. Is this actually saying, ( in a mind-bendingly circuitous manner), that a stick of butter weighs 120g?? I think it is but I can't be certain. And while there are a few things I do rather well in a state of vague confusion, baking, my friends, just ain't one of them. 

  

 It's not helping my quest that I'm side tracked by a long neglected paperback in my collection called Festive Baking in Austria, Germany and Switzerland (Sarah Kelly, Penguin, London, 1985). As the name suggests it's pretty niche in subject and scope. It's also chock full of just the kind of obscure recipes and anally retentive cooking trivia I adore. And- hallelujah- the publishers have done the right thing and provided metric and Imperial weights for everything that needs them. There are goodies in here I so want to cook; date macaroons, spitzbuben (butter-based biscuits pasted together with jam), Dresden stollen, spicy pfeffernusse and rum flavoured pretzels. I'm floored by how seriously they take their festive treats in this neck of the woods. Despite my own flurry of Christmas baking ( the few dozen gingerbread biscuits,  six or so panforte for distribution among the neighbours and some almond babka or brioche for Christmas breakfast) it strikes me that, in Teutonic terms at least, I'm a rank amateur. In preparation for December 25th these guys fashion thierown, home made marzipan into entire armies of little people. They bake meringue -based decorative wreaths for their trees and doors, construct small dwellings from decorated slabs of gingerbread  dough and artfully cleave lebkuchen into star-shaped candle holders for the table. Wow. 

   

Naturally the one person who doesn't care about any of this is The Kid. While I'm pondering the deeper meaning of Christmas as expressed through the baking traditions of Mittel Europa, and fretting over the inconvenient truths of American Culinary Colonialism, all he wants to do is wrap himself in unbaked dough, head to toe, then plaster the entire arrangement in a finger-painted layer of forest green sugar glaze. He's also rather keen to investigate the impact of pressing the star cutter deep into whatever part of the cat's anatomy is most easily accessed and that's an experiment in Actions And Consequences I'm willing to let him explore. He's eyeing up my roll of ribbon too and his plan for this, apparently, is to thread it endlessly around the legs of various bits of furniture into a dangerously effective, ankle-level booby trap worthy of the meanest Viet Cong. In that same spirit, my rolling pins, spatulas and paint brushes are fast being requisitioned for his own imaginary cache of WMDs. My therapeutic baking session is fast degenerating into a Shock and Awe campaign that Rumsfeld himself couldn't have choreographed better and, with blood pressure rising, I'm getting cranky.  On perfect cue, the phone rings and it's a saintly school parent offering to take a pose of Year 2's to see the movie Where The Wild Things Are. All I know is that one of these is currently loose in my kitchen and I can't get him out the door fast enough. Eventually my wild thing goes to off to learn about other wild things and this particular hopping-frigging-mad thing ultimately calms down and bakes. Alone. With her electronic scales, ipod and a few unseen spiders. Bliss. 

  

  

Honey, spice and chocolate biscuits 

  

Makes about 30  

  

40ml (2 tablespoons) honey 

75g (1/3 cup, firmly packed) brown sugar 

60g unsalted butter, chopped 

1 egg, lightly beaten 

1 teaspoon vanilla extract 

250g (1 2/3 cups) plain flour, plus extra for kneading 

2 tablespoons cocoa 

3/4 teaspoon baking powder 

2 teaspoons ground mixed spice 

  

Sugar glaze 

2 egg whites, at room temperature 

11/2 teaspoons lemon juice 

320g (2 cups) icing sugar, sifted 

Food colouring 

Cachous, to decorate  

 

Combine honey, sugar and butter in a saucepan and stir over low heat for 2-3 minutes or until the sugar is dissolved. Remove from the heat and cool to room temperature. Add the egg and vanilla then stir until mixture is smooth. 

  

Sift flour, cocoa, baking powder and mixed spice into a large bowl. Add butter mixture then, using a wooden spoon, stir until a dough forms. Turn dough out onto a very lightly floured work surface then using your hands knead dough for a few minutes until smooth. Press dough into a disc then wrap in plastic wrap and refrigerate for 1 hour or overnight. Preheat oven to 170C and line 2 baking trays with baking paper. Cut dough in half then, working with one piece at a time, roll dough out on a lightly floured surface until about 4mm thick. Using 8-10cm cutters (angels, bells, Christmas trees, doves etc), cut out dough, reserving scraps. Re roll scraps and cut into shapes. Place biscuits on trays then, using the end of a wooden skewer, make a hole in each biscuit about 1cm from the top edge. Bake biscuits, in batches, for 12 minutes or until firm and light golden then transfer to a cooling rack. While still hot, carefully re-pierce each hole with the skewer as it will close over slightly during baking. 

  

For icing, combine egg whites and 1 teaspoon of the lemon juice in a bowl then, using electric beaters, whisk until frothy. With motor running, add icing sugar, half a cup at a time, whisking well between each addition. Continue whisking until the mixture is thick, white and glossy. Add remaining lemon juice and stir to combine well. Divide icing between small bowls and tint each with food colours of your choice. Using a small paint brush, cover the surface of cold biscuits with icing, adding a little warm water  to icing if it becomes too thick (it will thicken on standing so keep it covered when not using) or more icing sugar if too thin.  Alternately, pipe icing directly onto unglazed biscuits as desired. Sprinkle with coloured cachous then allow to dry for about 4 hours or until icing has hardened. Biscuits will keep, stored in an airtight container, for up to one month. When ready to use, thread ribbon or cord through holes, tie to secure then hang from Christmas tree.