6 Christmas Treats That Prove the Benefits of a Stone Worktop
It’s the most wonderful time of the year… and the most heavy-going in your kitchen! The whole Christmas season relies upon food and drink, making it a busy time for any kitchen—so is yours up to the challenge? If you have chosen a stone worktop for your kitchen, you’ll experience the benefits of a stone worktop, from durability to effortless cleaning.
With a high-quality surface like marble, granite, or quartz, you’ll find festive baking and cooking much easier—so you’ll be giving Mary Berry a run for her money!
Mince Pies
The benefits of a stone worktop truly shine when working with pastry. The naturally cool surface makes rolling and kneading far easier, especially when your kitchen is heating up during festive preparations. Even if you’re short on time, mince pies are simple to construct for perfectly homemade Christmas treats.
With the amount of rolling and cutting involved, a stone worktop ensures a hassle-free process, leaving you more time to enjoy the festive spirit!
Yule Log
Yule logs are a fun festive treat to bring your helper kitchen elves (or family) into the kitchen. Everyone loves a chocolate cake, and the helpers will love licking the mixing bowl even more! Or perhaps you’re more traditional and get together to stir in a silver sixpence to the Christmas pudding mixture.
For family cooking, your marble kitchen island will come into its own. With space to gather together, your cooking experience is more social and more festive!
Gingerbread House
We’re back in the realm of dough rolling here. A gingerbread or cinnamon biscuit house will fill your kitchen with the scents of the season and, when constructed, will provide a tasty centrepiece to your Christmas treats! It’s just the putting together that is the tricky bit! One of the key Benefits of a Stone Worktop is its naturally cool surface, which keeps the biscuit dough workable as you shape the pieces into the right sizes and angles to fit together.
For gingerbread biscuit houses, we’d advise following a plan to get the pieces right. As stone worktops are so strong and durable, it’s best not to use sharp knives to cut the pieces directly on your work surface: save your knives and use a plastic spatula instead
Peppermint Bark
This is a classic from across the Atlantic. Like most Christmas treats, it’s all the naughty things: a layer of peppermint-infused white chocolate under a layer of dark chocolate, which has crushed candy cane sprinkled into it. It tastes amazing.
However, as with any chocolate work, your kitchen worktop will need to balance the hot with the cold. In this, stone is the ideal material. A sealed granite surface will resist the base of hot pans while remaining cool to the touch when it comes to manipulating the chocolate or candy.
Roast Potatoes
A Christmas day classic – no dinner table is complete without a dish of tantalising roasties steaming away! Cooking the perfect potatoes relies on two things: texture and basting. If you’re the designated cook for your Christmas dinner, you’ll be well versed in the practice of basting: From turkey to pigs in blankets to roast potatoes and parsnips, everything required basting in hot oil.
To avoid losing oven heat, you’ll need to take each dish out of the oven briefly to baste. If your worktop is quartz, granite or marble, you’ll be able to rest the hot dish directly on the worktop instead of having to carry it across the kitchen. Small things can make a big difference!
Mulled Wine
Whether you infuse red wine from scratch with your oranges, cinnamon and cloves or simply crack open a bottle of supermarket mulled wine, you likely heat the drink on your stove.
You then serve it like you never otherwise serve wine – with a ladle! This inevitably involves spillage, however well aimed your pouring. When your worktop is constructed with stone, no matter how light in colour, any spillage will not stain. So, cheers!
Zenstone Ltd is a Surrey-based leader with over 30 years of experience crafting bespoke granite, marble, and quartz units using traditional and modern techniques. Contact us today!
