Oh dear, I haven’t put anything on for a while, I do hope Mr Claus doesn’t warrant lapsed blogging as bad. As (hopefully) you will see I have been busy making my own christmas cake. Yes, it is all my own work, cake, almond paste and icing. When I was a young calf the christmas cake and pudding were made in October. The pudding mixture was made in the morning so that we could all have a stir of it and make a wish before noon – I have no recollection of any rhyme or reason for this tradition but we always did it so. But it was the christmas cake mixture we all loved eating, in fact I’m surprised we didn’t end up with a small cake considering how much tasting we did before it even made it into the cake tin from the mixing bowl!

And now I make the family christmas cake for the annual gathering, following my mother’s recipe, of course. Ours is not one of those dark, dry, cramped full of dried fruit affairs, no, it’s not too much darker than yours truly in colour with a nice ratio of fruit to cake and baked just enough. The almond paste is messy to make but I could never use shop-bought! Besides, the unused egg whites go to making the icing. I’m not into this fondant malarkey, good old fashioned icing is my thing. Okay, so my thing isn’t pristine smooth cakes, but it’s depicting windblown snow, that’s my excuse!

Tomorrow I head down to deepest, darkest Yorkshire, laden down with presents, cake and games to play.

Wishing you one and all, a very Merry Christmas  x

(Yay! The picture looks to be here in my preview, hope you can admire my handiwork too!)