Skip to main content

Christmas cakes


I finally got around to icing the Christmas cakes, but I think the mince pies will have to be a new year's event instead.  Well, and why not?  Following the tradition of recent years, I baked a large square cake from Nigella's recipe in How to Be a Domestic Goddess, cut it in half and iced each part separately.  This has the dual advantages of providing more icing and making the cake keep better.  Not that it ever seems to keep that long.

Long thin cakes lend themselves to long thin decorations, do they not?


Or else to digging out that old standby, the Christmas cookie cutters.  Every year I think I might do something really fancy, and then I run out of time and think, well, the important thing is that it tastes good!

Merry Christmas!

Comments

Popular posts from this blog

Enthusiasm and cynicism

Some while ago I heard a sermon on the story of Zacchaeus. I forget what the point of the sermon was - usually for this Bible passage it's something about Jesus saving everyone, even the unlikely people. But I remember wondering, did Zacchaeus really give all that money away? Image by Alexa from Pixabay You may remember the tale: Zacchaeus is a corrupt government official who is rather short. When Jesus arrives in town, Zacchaeus wants to get a look at him. So he climbs a tree to see over other people's heads. However, Jesus spots him and tells him to get out of the tree and go cook Jesus some dinner. I assume Jesus phrased it a little more nicely than that, because Zacchaeus is delighted, and moreover, promises to change his entire lifestyle. "Half of my possessions I give to the poor," he declares with the enthusiasm of the instant convert, "and anyone I've defrauded, I'll pay back four times over." The surrounding crowd are the cynics: Jesus, th...

Limestone Way: The Three B's

This walk on the Limestone Way takes me to three villages starting with B: Ballidon, Brassington, and Bradbourne.   Parwich to Brassington The weather forecast says it's fine, but as I walk out of Parwich some light rain starts, which persists for most of the walk. It's not enough to make me properly wet. Parwich sits in a large bowl; the kind of landscape where you can see where you're heading, where you came from, and the next hill you are going to have to climb. The area has been inhabited by humans for thousands of years .  A short climb up a field takes me to Highway Lane, which I follow down again, and then bear left across the fields to Ballidon. I can see the chimney of Ballidon Quarry, and a building which looks like an old chapel. I assume it must now be a private house, but when I get there, I discover that this is All Saints church, now in the care of the Friends of Friendless Churches. What a nice surprise! I'm intrigued by the Creed and Ten Com...

Working on sunshine

Freeeee electricity!  No, seriously.  This guy came and knocked on the door one day, and I don't usually pay any more attention to random strangers trying to sell me something at the door than you probably do, but I guess he must have said "free" enough times to penetrate my consciousness, so I found myself agreeing to have someone check our house's suitability for solar panels.  And another guy turned up, and measured; and another one, and we signed; and a few more, and put up scaffolding and panels and meter boxes and cable; and suddenly, if we're careful, we can avoid paying for any electricity during daylight hours, because it's all generated right up there above our heads. Of course, we have the British government to thank for this, which probably means we're paying for it somewhere along the line.  The Department for Energy and Climate Change (presumably it's actually against climate change rather than for it, although you never know) has...