What has the weather been like where you are this weekend? Better than it has been here in Liverpool I hope? It has been truly the type of weather where the best option is to pop the heating on and hunker down indoors, lighting a candle and shutting the world away.
One of the fence panels even blew down, which is very much a domestic disaster in our world, but then I think that we should really thank our lucky stars as we so rarely suffer the extreme types of weather that some parts of the world do. Apparently its very British to discuss the weather, is that right?
1) A run - 6 km this weekend, I am trying soooo very hard to get up to 10km.
2) Food shopping, boring but essential. We may have sneaked in a cuppa and a slice of millionaire shortbread as a reward for that too ;)
3) The local retail park - that was fun. My lovely son, usually such a sunny chap can turn into a monster when shopping is involved. So the hot chocolate we had when we got home could not have been in a more appropriate cup!
Other than those trips out we did indoorsy things. Made some more Christmas ornaments to follow on from last weeks Bauble Wreath, cooked essential meals, fajitas, chili con carne, and ate takeaway....and then leftover takeaway (which tasted even better than when it was freshly cooked).
I planted an amaryllis, very much hoping it will flower at New Year, so we can start the year with some colour and new life in our home.
I also helped EB make gingerbread. I say 'helped', I am a bit like her sous-chef. I wonder whether Nigella, Jamie and co. started out with their Mum fetching, carrying and clearing up after them?
She used this recipe from BBC Good Food. (I do love that site). It was really straightforward, although true to form by the end of the cooking nearly every bowl and spoon in the kitchen had been used.
There was not too much worth taking photos of during the making, but I do love these tins - the one above we keep our plain flour in. I assume its meant for cereal but it's just the right size and shape for flour.
I love this tin too - Lyle's Golden Syrup. I think I can remember hearing that Golden Syrup was discovered as a by-product of sugar refining - and a very scrummy one it is too! This packaging has not been updated or changed in all the time it has been produced. Who would have thought that Golden Syrup was so fascinating? You can see more about it's story here.
We have loads of biscuit cutters, but most of them are mini, like this mini gingerbread man here - he is quite tiny.
Of course, as usual we had a canine observer. Max waited patiently to see if any of that tasty gingerbread mix dropped in his direction. Sorry Maxie bit I'm not sure gingerbread is very good for you....
When the biscuits were cooked they had lost their shape and to be honest they looked a bit odd, sort of puffy. So we tried a trick that I think I can recall seeing on The Great British Bake Off, which was to use the cutters again on the puffy biscuits.
This seemed to do the trick, but we had to be really quick as it didn't work so well once they had cooled. A very happy by-product of this technique was all the off cuts - of course we had to test them....surely off-cuts like that are calorie free???
The recipe made loads of these mini-biscuits, and I can vouch that they are very tasty indeed. They are paler I think than some recipes. I'm sure in the past I have used treacle? These are light and not really very gingery, which I like. I guess if you like your gingerbread really gingery you could......well, add more ginger!
Have a great week x x
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