How to Cook Your Own Christmas Gifts

Christmas can be so expensive but you can cook your own luxurious Christmas gifts yourself. Home made Christmas gifts are lovely - they capture the real spirit of Christmas and are so personal. If you combine that with the traditional way of showing love - through the provision of food, you have real Christmas winner here.

Start planning your Christmas gifts in autumn and use that glut of fruit and vegetables to make beautiful and thoughtful Christmas presents for your loved ones.

Everyone likes to think that someone has put time and effort into making a unique and special gift and what could be better than these rich and spicy sweet and savoury preserves, liqueurs and cakes? This is how to cook your very own Christmas gifts - it's so easy.

In S W France, we have so much fruit during the summer and autumn that we are trampling apples, plums, grapes and peaches under foot. What a waste! Why not make all this wonderful fruit into delightful, economical and delicious gifts for Christmas?

Illustrated above

In September our orchards are full of peaches and apples: there's only so much that you want to eat as fruit, so why not try making it into chutney? This is the most wonderful, rich and spicy savoury preserve and is perfect for Christmas. It tastes of Christmas pudding (really). Serve with turkey or goose, cheese and cold meats. Delicous.

See the full step-by-step recipe here

A wonderfully warming and unusual preserve

If you grow courgettes you'll know how quickly they turn into marrows! It always seems as if today there is nothing to pick, or vegetables the size of your thumb, then within the next day or two these tiny courgettes have metamorphosed into colossal giants.

You can of course bake the marrows, or stuff them, but have you thought of making them into jam? Add ginger to this and you have a real winter warmer!

See the full step-by-step recipe here

More Christmas cooking ideas in a Christmas Recipe book on Amazon.com:

Christmas Recipes For Fabulous Feasts - Ideas for home-cooked gifts

This is a wonderful, Christmassy-looking Christmas recipe book. It will give you so many ideas for your Christmas celebration feasts and would make a super Christmas gift.

Sloes and wild damsons are free!

In the autumn the hedgerows in France are full of tiny, hard black fruits that are bitter and seemingly inedible but you can make them into a very tasty jelly just perfect for Christmas celebrations.

Ingredients

- 2lb / 1 kg sloes

- 4lb / 2 kg cooking apples

- 1 lemon

- 1 lb sugar to each pint of sloe juice

Method

- Frost helps to soften sloes but if they have been picked before the frosts, prick them with a fork

- Put the fruit in the pan with the lemon juice and peel. Cover with water and simmer until pulpy

- Wash and chop the apples. Put into a separate pan and cover with water and simmer until soft

- Strain the two fruit pulps and measur the juice.

- Bring the juice to the boil and add the sugar (1lb for each pint of juice)

- Stir until dissolved.

- Boil to the setting point

More than a little Christmas Spirit!

Ingredients

- Sloes

- Sugar

- Gin

- Cloves (optional)

- Cinnamon stick (optional)

- Almond essence (optional)

Method

- Prick the berries and put into a wide-necked jar until full. Add the sugar, cloves, almond essence and cinnamon. Cover with gin.

- Seal the jar, store in a cool, dark place and turn it daily. Wait for three months minimum and your liqueur is ready.

A very seasonal and unusual fruit

Medlars used to be popular in Victorian times but have since fallen out of fashion. This is a great shame as medlar trees are small, pretty trees with a rather 'Japanese' habit. They have beautiful, creamy white flowers in spring and attractive brownish fruits in autumn. These fruits are picked in November when they are soft. They have the texture and taste of stewed apples and they make a very unusual jam.

See the full step-by-step recipe How to make Medlar Jam

Start early for best results!

Make your Christmas cake early, feed it with brandy regularly and on Christmas day you'll have a rich, moist cake to serve to all your family and visitors. In England this cake is tradtionally served with cheese such as Red Leicester or Stilton and rice cake.

See the full step-by-step recipe here

For this recipe you will need to line your cake tin: How to Line a Cake Tin

Cloves give this jam a very seasonal flavour

This is a wonderfully fragrant, unusual and seasonal jam. To make it you will need:

Ingredients

1lb firm pears peeled and cored

1 lb sugar (I use a little less)

4 cloves per pound of fruit

Method

- Cut the pears into slices or cubes

- Sprinkle over the sugar

- Tie the cores and peelings in a muslin bag and place this in with the pears and sugar

- Leave overnight

- Put into a jam pam and simmer gently, stirring all the time, until the sugar has dissolved

- Add cloves

- Boil steadily until the fruit is transparent and the syrup has set

- Remove cores and peel and put into jars.

At Les Trois Chenes we have lots of grape vines and the grapes are delicious but have rather large pips, so I use them to make grape jelly. Here's how:

Ingredients

- 3 lbs ripe grapes

- 1/4 pint water

- 3 tablespoons lemon juice

- 3 1/4 lb sugar

- 1 bottle commercial pectin

Method

- Crush the fruit and put into a pan with water and bring to the boil

- Cover and simmer for ten minutes

- Put the fruit into a jelly bag or muslin cloth and leave to drain

- Put the sugar and juice and 1 1/4 pints of grape juice into a jam pan, heat slowly until the sugar has dissolved stirring occasionally

- Bring to the boil and stir in the pectin. Boil rapidly for half a minute and remove from heat

- Skim off any foam with a jam skimmer

- Put into jars

When we had goats at Les Trois Chenes we used to feed them all the surplus soft and damaged peaches, but the goats, sadly, had to go and now we are trampling the peaches under foot. We gather as many as we can and cut them into halves, remove the stones and put into the freezer. During the winter when the wood burning stove is on, we make this gorgeous jam.

See the full step-by-step recipe here