Christmas at Green Gables: 41 Baking Recipes for a Prince Edward Island Christmas (PDF)

The cakes are made in November.

At Green Gables the Christmas baking began weeks before anyone lit a candle. Fruit was chopped in the quiet after the harvest. Peel was candied over five slow days. Cakes went into the cool cupboard to wait, and the waiting was the recipe.

That is the part modern Christmas books leave out. They tell you how to make the thing, and nothing about when to start, so the cake that needed three weeks gets made on the twentieth of December and tastes like it.

This book is the season put back in order. Forty-one recipes drawn from the world of L. M. Montgomery's Anne of Green Gables and the working Prince Edward Island farmhouses it was written about, arranged in eight sections that run from the first cake of November to the New Year.

WHAT EVERY RECIPE CARRIES

A headnote, so you know what you are making and where it came from.

Ingredients converted to standard cups and weights, with a stated yield.

A method, numbered and complete, with nothing assumed.

The historical context. How Island kitchens managed it, with a wood stove and no refrigeration, and why that made the dish what it is.

A modern kitchen note. What to watch, what changed for a modern oven, and how long the finished thing keeps at room temperature, in the refrigerator and frozen.

The proportions come from tested, reliable ratios. The canning and candy temperatures follow current safety guidance. Nothing here asks you to guess.

WHAT IS INSIDE

The Christmas Cakes, weeks before the day: Marilla's black fruitcake, Christmas cake with almond paste and royal icing, candied orange and lemon peel, candied cherries, marzipan fruits, fig pudding, Christmas pudding sauce.

Cookies for the Christmas Concert: Susan's monkey-faces, Prince Edward Island molasses cookies, sugar cookie stars, hermits, almond macaroons, rolled butter cookies for the tree.

Kitchen Mischief, candy and steam and a certain amount of trouble: Anne and Diana's molasses taffy pull, chocolate caramels, peppermint humbugs, sugar plums, nut brittle.

Christmas Morning: Green Gables doughnuts, cinnamon buns, brown bread, apple fritters, raisin bread.

The Christmas Dinner Table: Cherry pie, raspberry tarts, cranberry tart, baked apple dumplings, snow pudding with custard sauce, steamed carrot pudding.

Afternoons in the Parlor: Pound cake, red and yellow jelly, gingerbread loaf, jelly roll, queen cakes, hot spiced cranberry cup.

Gifts from the Green Gables Kitchen: Cherry preserves, Marilla's yellow plum preserves, crab-apple jelly, Seville marmalade.

The New Year: Bread pudding from the Christmas loaf, trifle from leftover cake.

Illustrated throughout with original pen and ink drawings, with one opening each section.

THE PRINTABLE KITCHEN SHEETS

Ten printed sheets arrive with the book, as a second file.

The Christmas Baking Countdown, the whole season laid out in weeks rather than dates, so it works wherever you are. The Keeping Chart, all forty-one recipes with how long each one lasts and how to store it. The Ratio Almanac, nine proportions worth knowing and what goes wrong on either side of them. Tins and Temperatures. When You Have Run Out. What Went Wrong, symptom on the left and cause on the right. Putting Up Safely. Jar labels and gift tags you can type into or print blank. And two more for the Companion's four seasons.

Print them, put them inside a cupboard door, and stop looking things up mid recipe with flour on your hands.

THE PRACTICAL PART

Format: PDF, 163 pages, about 33 MB.

Delivery: instant download after checkout, plus a link by email.

Reading: any phone, tablet, laptop or e-reader that opens a PDF.

Printing: yes. Print the whole thing or a single recipe, at home or at a print shop.

Sized 6 by 9 inches, so printed pages sit neatly in a binder.

For your own kitchen. Please do not redistribute or resell.

Also available in paperback, if you would rather have it on the shelf or give it to someone.

Get the paperback on Amazon — $15.99

WHO IT IS FOR

Anyone who has read Anne of Green Gables and wondered what any of it tasted like. Anyone who starts thinking about Christmas in October. Anyone who has ever meant to make a proper fruitcake and found out too late that it wanted a month.

If you want quick festive traybakes, this is not that book. The peel takes five days and the black fruitcake wants three weeks in a cupboard before you cut it. That is the point of them.

A companion volume to The Green Gables Kitchen Companion, which covers the other three seasons. Nothing in one repeats anything in the other.

Written by Ida Marsh. Published by Guava Tree Press.