Tuesday, December 24, 2013

Christmas preparations

This year, with working part-time and the bank holidays, I've ended up with a 3.5 week Christmas holiday whilst only using up 4 days of annual leave. This is the longest break I've had since I was an undergraduate, and I've had a great time getting things sorted out for Christmas, oh and getting a new shed, but more about that in a later post.

Back in November I made the Christmas cake. This is the dried fruit and brandy soaking overnight.


And the cake when it came out of the oven.

Then I poured brandy over it every week until last week, when I added the marzipan to it. Which I forgot to photograph.
Then today I iced it, using the cop-out ready-made fondant icing instead of royal icing.

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This is batch of mince pies number three.


I also made stollen for the first time ever, and it was surprisingly easy, just time consuming because of having to leave it to rise for a while. I made one batch using the Delia recipe, but that is actually much more complicated than the Paul Hollywood recipe I used for the second batch, which also has more dried fruit it so it a lot tastier too.

As you do, a week before Christmas, I finally got the curtains altered that I've been meaning to do for nearly four years now...


I had these up in my old house, and the windows here are smaller, so the curtains were covering the top of the radiators - not ideal in the winter, so I've shortened them (there's a second pair too) to a more sensible length. This is one of the spare bedrooms ready for Christmas guests!


Think that's all for now. Another post to follow shortly with my finished projects on!
I hope you all have a fantastic Christmas!




3 comments:

Una said...

Sewing machines are so useful. It's amazing how you can salvage something and make it even better, just by simple alterations.

Mary deB said...

Merry Christmas to you!

ShinyNewThing said...

Woo hoo! Daisy using a sewing machine!