SusieJ's Advent Calendar: December 15, 2007

The recipe: Chocolate roll

This is the chocolate lover's dream cake. The flourless cake has the most intense chocolate flavor of any you've tasted, and the lightly sweetened whipped cream filling makes it light rather than heavy. would you believe it's only eggs, sugar, coffee, chocolate and whipped cream?

The surprise: Antique lights

Bill Nelson has a passion for antique electric Christmas lights. His site, showcasing his personal collection, explores the history of this Christmas tradition. My father had the Disney light set featured here, and he nearly set fire to the house with bubble lights like these. (They get very hot when left on all night.)

Christmas reading

Before Thanksgiving, even before planning for Thanksgiving, I start planning what I'll bake for Christmas. I look through my recipes to pick out my favorites and pull out all the Christmas baking books and the Christmas issues of the magazines I've saved. The books and magazines go by my bed for light evening reading. (There is a similar stack in the kitchen for Thanksgiving side dishes, appetizers and desserts.)

A really good cookbook or cooking magazine is one that can be read outside the kitchen. Some, like Saveur magazine and Mimi Sheraton's Visions of Sugarplums, focus on the culture around the food as much as the recipes. The mainstream magazines have great photography, lots of "new twists," and the occasional gem from someone's family traditions.

It should also make me want to bake. Photos help, but a great cookbook author like Nick Malgieri or Dorie Greenspan writes recipes that are yummy when read. Dorie Greenspan's Baking kept me entertained on the train for a week.

Before my cookbook and magazine collection became so large, I would read and re-read a few old standbys. Returning from college to my mother's house, Martha Stewart helped me through a number of insomniac nights. I'd dream of hosting parties for a hundred of my closest friends and serving finger foods and cookies, champagne and egg nog. This was the early 90s, when Martha was first launching her empire.

The first copy of Sheraton's Visions of Sugarplums I had was a photocopy (of the entire book -- this is what office workers did before the Internet and BitTorrent) held together in one of those binders for green bar reports. During the holidays, I would spend every spare moment reading through it. Sheraton has travelled the world, and her love for Christmas and its traditions is obvious in the extensive collection of recipes she assembled. She shows how traditions cross national and ethnic boundaries, and how different cultures emphasize different parts of the holiday, and has recipes for everything. My second copy was bought used, as soon as used bookstores moved to the Internet. An enterprising publisher could make a bundle re-issuing this book.

My first Christmas in West Virginia, an issue of Bon Appetit with the theme "Christmas around the world" substituted for the poor television reception. The focus was on traditional recipes (my favorites), and there was even some good travel writing. It was a connection back to the urban Christmases of my college years.