Happy New Year

                                                                   The Tree

The start of another year so thought I would post a few Christmas photos as a reminder of a lovely holiday.

                                                                           The "Boat"

 

                                                                Christmas Eve Pudding

                                    Stuffing the turkey (Sharon note the man of the house does this!)

                                                               The "children's" stockings

                                                        Smiling faces on Christmas Morning

                                                                     Carving the turkey

                                                                   Christmas Day walk

                                                          Boxing Day walk - Ellie climbing a gate!

Christmas and Birthday Cake

David is one of the unlucky folk who have a birthday at Christmas.  Every year since we have been married I have ensured he has had a birthday cake.  This year however we will be going away in January and not wanting to leave our housesitter with two leftover cakes I thought we would have a combined Christmas and Birthday cake.  My good friend Ellie who has offered to make the cake was slightly horrified but followed my instructions to the letter and this is the result. 

Snow

Couldn;t resist putting a picture of our snow on my blog as everyone else seems to have snow pictures.  If you look really closely you will see it!

Cooking on hold!

Cooking will be on hold for a few days as I am deeply immersed in decorating.  This was not planned!  Last weekend our waterbed developed a leak which shouldn't have been a problem but after a failed repair we decided a new mattress was called for.  We drained the mattress (or so we thought) and tied it in a bundle and tried to carry it downstairs - I had a good idea to slide it down the stairs as it was a bit heavy - wrong.  There was still water in it and guess what as we pushed it down the stairs the water started to leak out.  Fortunately we managed to catch it before we lost too much.  The photo is of David draining the rest of the water just outside the front door. 

Having taken the mattress out of the bed it is easy to move so we decided to decorate before getting a new mattress.  Spent most of Sunday moving drawers etc and getting ready to paint.  "I'll give you a hand next weekend" says David.  Wrong again - he's on a safety boat course all weekend so no guesses for who is doing the decorating.

A rescued failure

I have been making cakes of all sorts for too many years that I care to remember but I have never ever made successful florentines.  On Saturday afternoon as the weather was awful I thought I'll have another go.  I found a recipe and followed it to the letter (not something I do very often).  I measured everything really carefully, set the oven as instructed - even heating it up first and cooked them for exactly the time stated.  Result - disaster!  They spread out all over the tin and stuck fast.  With a huge amount of hacking I managed to separate them from the tin in thousands of pieces but undeterred decided I could use then for florentine ice cream!  It was delicious though somewhat chewy - too much florentine and not enough ice cream I think.  The first picture is what they should have looked like, the second one is the "bits" and the third picture is the ice cream.

Penguins and a Scorpion

By special request I am putting a picture of Alison's 50th birthday cake on my blog.  I was too busy to make one so asked Helen Rollinson who makes cakes for a business to make me one - the brief was iced with marzipan and either sailing or Antartica.  I might add that I gave Helen less than two weeks to come up with something.  This is the result and underneath the icing a delicious carrot cake.

Knitting

It is over a month since my last blog - that's because I have spent the last month knitting squares for Zoe's Brownies.  Before I could start I had to search the cupboards and the loft for wool and needles.  The first lot I found had a no. 7, a no 8 and a no. 11 needle but not a pair.  When I eventually found the matching needles I tackled my first square using some grey wool I found.  Those of you who have known me a for a long time will recognise this as the grey wool from a and grey and white sweater I started to knit many years ago!!  The wool was a bit dull in colour so made a trip to the newly opened wool shop in Weymouth and bought some new wool.  It took two or three attempts to get something square but once I had got the hang of things I managed a respectable number of squares which I posted off to Zoe today.  This is the result.