festive

Yikes, a whole month since I last posted!

Oh dear. Well, December happened at its usual insane velocity. And then on Christmas Eve I came down with the worst cold I ever recall having.  I had a fever for four days, so I was quite spaced out to say the least and it's all a bit hazy now. I think I had fun some of the time though. We watched the Slow TV sleigh ride thing on Christmas Eve and I do remember enjoying that, because it made no demands of me whatsoever and there was no music.

I'm still not completely right but I'm drinking a hot toddy and that's helping a bit. My Beloved came down with something similar, though not as extreme, on Saturday night, followed by Miss M on Monday, so we've been a right bunch of wrecks apart from The Boy. Touch wood. Luckily there was nothing that we were going to do that couldn't be cancelled so there has been a lot of vegging out and much watching of Star Trek and Eureka.

I hope everybody else has had fun!

Last post of November!

Greetings from the cat.

Ten minutes until December. Oh dear, I appear to have mislaid a month or six..

I do have a proper sensible what-we-did-on-Saturday post to do but it requires a daylight photo, so tomorrow maybe, and I just wanted to do another post in November so that I don't feel too much like an intermittent blogger. Which I am of course, but you know, good intentions and all that!

Also St.Andrews Day - I feel I should post on St. Andrews Day, having enjoyed the Google doodle and everything, even if I'm only posting a picture of my Scottish cat.

forward planning

The PTA Christmas Fair (or Fayre, I dunno) and the Christmas disco are coming up and I'm baking for both. So being quite incredibly organised, I've actually planned what I'm baking and I've done a trial run of one of them. Seems implausible doesn't it?

Pinterest has been very useful in getting fairy cake/cupcake decoration ideas. I'm a fan of the chocolate orange anyway, so when I saw pictures of chocolate orange cupcakes, well... Drool. I had a rummage through my various recipe books and found a recipe for chocolate fairy cakes - though as always it was a weird quantity, enough for 16. I've only ever seen tins for 12 ever, in my whole life. Mind you, it's better than the recipe I used for the Hallowe'en cupcakes which said something random like 'makes 27'. 

Miss M and I threw together a batch at the weekend, iced them with *blush* ready-made 'frosting' (butter icing in this case as far as I can tell) and topped with Chocolate Orange Minis. Well, most of them - Miss M doesn't like chocolate oranges, weird kid, so she had them without the segment. The Boy has had a cake in his packed lunch every day so far this week, but there are, ahem, only a couple left now. The ready-made frosting feels like a total cheat but it goes on so easily and is much tastier than I thought it would be, so I'm happy with it. Thumbs up from all!

I'd like to try them with orange essence in the cake mix but I fear Miss M would disapprove. Oh well, two batches, eh?

My other plan is to make rainbow cupcakes, so we'll need to give those a trial run too. Miss M likes playing with food colouring so I'm sure it'll all go swimmingly. Maybe.

lurching into winter

It snowed on Friday night. The snow didn't last beyond Saturday evening but it proved that autumn has definitely gone. It had lingered longer than usual really, being quite a dry and mild autumn, but we had gales last week and suddenly the trees are bare. So these pictures are my final fling of autumn, all taken in mid-October when we were visiting my parents.

 Looking at them now I'm realising how much warmth is in them!

I'm having a bit of trouble blogging because my knitting mojo is AWOL and I'm feeling essentially boring - how sad is that? I want to knit but I want it to be something soothing and easy. I have wool, I have needles, but can't make up my mind about a pattern!  As for being boring, well, I've been studying. Bit behind at the moment but life happens sometimes! I did my first assignment for this course a couple of weeks ago and got 84% for it which was a relief as this course is quite a step up from the one I did last year and it was all feeling a bit alarming. The first assignment is always an emotional hurdle I think.

I'd better stop now - Cat 1 is knocking things over, a sure sign that it's time the cats were fed and that I go to bed! I'll try to be (even) more fascinating in the next post.

there's a light (over at Peeriemoot's place)

Particularly tough neeps this year!

Worth the effort though. I hung the jagged eyed neepie lantern outside the house while I took the kids out guising, carrying the other one with me and pausing to relight it every few minutes of course - there was hardly a breath of wind, but just enough combined with moving around I suppose! Every year I tell myself I'll get some of those little electric tealights, and every year I forget. However when we got back to the house the outside lantern was still burning, so that was pretty good going. Astonishing actually!

may contain traces of sugar

There has been a certain amount of Hallowe'en-inspired culinary creativity going on in the last couple of days.

 Miss M came home from school today with 'Dracula's dentures' today - two digestive biscuits, mini-marshmallows, icing sugar and food colouring. Pretty effective, don't you think?

And the Boy came had Home Ec. today so he came home with a chocolate apple - I'm quite relieved they didn't try toffee apples!

So they were happy eating their creation.

Miss M's school had their Hallowe'en disco last night so I was providing a bit of home baking. I made two batches of chocolate chip cookies because they're quick and easy, but they looked a bit boring so I did a quick batch of fairy cakes as well, and then looked on Pinterest for decorating inspiration, and rather regretted it. It turns out that some people really throw themselves into producing incredibly disgusting-looking Hallowe'en party food. I stuck with spiders' webs and eyeballs as being just gross enough to satisfy children, but not actually stomach churning to look at.

I'm not really cut out for fiddly cake decorating but these were reasonably easy using squeezy tubes of icing. Reasonably. That's me all baked out for a while though!

Mother's Ruin

Just not this mother.

Having investigated making scrambled egg, my next culinary adventure inspired by my fondness for crime fiction set in the first half of the 20th century was gin.
Specifically Gin and It, i.e. gin and Italian vermouth.

Despite my name I've never tried or even wanted to try gin, so this was genuinely new territory for me, or rather us, as My Beloved joined in.

So, gin. Gin, gin, gin. It's absolutely mingin' isn't it?

We tried Gin and It with varying proportions until the vermouth just about drowned out the gin. Then we tried gin and lemonade. At that point I gave up and had vermouth and lemonade which I *do* like. My Beloved persevered and tried gin and coke, gin and Irn Bru, and goodness knows what else. This evening we tried gin and tonic, it being the classic.

Not so.

Oh Em and indeed Gee.  Nasty medicinal topped with even nastier medicinal (I leave it to you which is which). It was like doing a Bushtucker Trial. I think we'll have to face it, we're just not cut out to be grownups...