Thanh Berthou

The chicken is marinated in a classic Vietnamese marinade and served grilled over a bed of vermicelli noodles, salad, fresh herbs and a traditional Vietnamese dipping sauce (nuoc cham). A Vietnamese salad is likely to include the following: Vietnamese salads are typically big on fresh flavours and textures, so you will often find a good number of herbs, including: What is essential to this dish is the Vietnamese dipping sauce (nuoc cham) which is used here to dress and season the noodles. Unless the children are old enough to have the dexterity to twirl the noodles onto their forks (mine still like to decorate the floor with the sticky noodles), steamed rice goes equally well with this marinated chicken, and the salad can be served Western-style in a large bowl with the nuoc cham dipping sauce used as a salad dressing. The chicken is marinated in a classic Vietnamese marinade and served grilled over a bed of vermicelli noodles, salad, fresh herbs and a traditional Vietnamese dipping sauce (nuoc cham).

So I thought it was worth posting one of my regular “tweaks” to my favourite moist chocolate cake recipe, which is Nigella Lawson’s Sour-Cream Chocolate Cake. But in case you are interested, here is my recipe for an Easy Chocolate Cake, aka my go-to-recipe for birthdays, celebrations, or simply when the craving for a good old-fashioned chocolate cake arises. easy”  about this chocolate cake recipe is that all of the ingredients go into the food processor, at the same time, and then blitzed until you have a lovely, thick chocolate batter. For this easy chocolate cake recipe, I like to use a 23cm (9 inch) round cake tin.

Every year, in various parts of Switzerland (though don’t tell the children this), families will hike through the chilly air and thick forests to visit Samichlaus and Schmutzli in their hut. But unlike the generous Santa Claus who fulfils the impossible feat of delivering the precisely requested gifts to children all over the world during one single night on Christmas Eve, Samichlaus is a bit cash-strapped and instead prefers to give the gift of a gentle lecture to children about kindness and manners, rewarding well-behaved children with a Samichlaussäckli filled with nuts and fruit. St. Nicholas Day falls on the 6th December each year and this is the day when Samichlaus visits the children to have a chat about kindness and manners. In the lead up to St. Nicholas Day on 6th December every year, many shops and supermarkets will start selling pre-filled Samichlaus bags (called Samichlaussäckli in Swiss German).

As a child growing up in Australia, the only Christmas cookie I knew of were gingerbread man cookies. Gingerbread men feature prominently in our home at Christmas, but the children often raid the cookie cutter collection, so dinosaurs and princess crowns also somehow make it into our Christmas cookie assortment! But you might need to experiment; the cookies harden as they cool, and sometimes the very crunchy cookies are best suited to decorating the Christmas tree 😉 For a more simple and buttery gingerbread cookie, I recommend the recipe for my Gingerbread Sablé. If the dough is a bit soft and the shapes cannot be removed from the cookie cutters easily, you might find it easier to stamp out all of the shapes and to then remove the excess dough using a small palette knife.