60 Sleeps to go....

Today has been a busy one with Oliver getting his last lot of baby injections, the poor boy and baking lots of mince pie starlets and stars with a cinnamon glaze.
Home made mince pies are fabulous, the best thing about them is you can make them as deep filled as you like! There is nothing worse than when you sit down to eat your scrummy mince pie on Christmas Eve only to bite into it and it to taste like pastry with a hint of mince meat. Be brave whip out the mixer and make up your very own short crust pastry or if you are worried about making it yourself buy some ready made and roll it out fill it to the brim and cover them! For an extra special touch mix up some ground cinnamon with soft light brown sugar and sift the mixture generously over the finished pies. This gives wonderful after notes to your pies and will leave you desperate for more and is sure to wow your house guests!

Ok, so I said I would write a little about Christmas day…

Well we try and get up before the children, which usually means being up at about 6am to light the fire and keep it burning beautifully ready for the decent of the children down the stairs to the living room. We try every year to open one gift at a time but with six very eager children this doesn’t really pan out to well.

We stay in our pj’s the whole day, even during dinner. We don’t have too many things we always do on Christmas day except relax and enjoy each others company as much as possible.

The setting of the table is very important to me, I want the children and David and this year our guests to come in and have their breath taken away. This is no small task and over the next couple of months I will be coming up with some designs of how the Christmas table will look this year.

I am very lucky to have a fabulous chef in the house, David is amazing at taking ordinary joints and turning them into culinary delights. We work together to prepare much of the meal like the veggies and ‘pigs in blankets’ but I would not risk leaving me in charge of the turkey.
We as you can see have the traditional Christmas dinner; we like to accent it with extra little gems which surprise the taste buds such as homemade redcurrant jelly made from redcurrant’s we picked ourselves and froze within 30 minutes of picking.
We will be starting the meal with a modern twist on a prawn cocktail, and finishing with White chocolate and mascarpone filled chocolate flutes with a sprinkling of raspberry coulee and fresh raspberries.