Gingerbread Houses

Have you ever made a gingerbread house? I used to make one every year when my son was a kid, and I used to make them when my sister, my brother and myself where kids too, but the last house I made was in 2002 and since then I haven’t been able to go ahead with projects that require that level of physical input.

23.12. Christmas Honey Cake

London was cloaked in rain filled clouds today, it was a chilly 8 degrees and the wind was going straight through all my 5 layers of clothes when I went to the hospital for my weekly blood test. So, typical December weather for London then! No gardening for me today either, although I did deadhead my pansies and pinks in my window boxes in my front garden, that counts for a bit of gardening, doesn’t it? At least they are still flowering! I have done my last bit of preparation for Christmas today, baked my honey cake, and I wanted to share my recipe with you as this is a wonderful cake – easy to make, suitable all year round, but especially for this time of year with all the lovely spices it contains. I have posted the recipe before, but that was a long time ago, so here it comes again, my absolute favourite cake, and the most asked after in my family :-)

16.12. Ice cream heaven!

We have had a lot of rain lately, and I have not been out in the garden for a good few days. Sitting down tonight to write a post I decided to share a recipe with you instead of writing about my garden for a change, as I really haven’t got any big news to come with in regards to my garden, it is after all December and I live in London! My recipe tonight is for homemade ice cream. I thought I would share the recipe with you, as this is not an ordinary ice cream. You don’t need an ice cream maker, and it doesn’t need to be stirred whilst freezing. You just make it and bung it in the freezer and forget about it until you want to eat it. Easy as that!

04.12. Gingerbread Houses

Hello, it’s the first Sunday in December! Ohhh, you already knew, well, to me it actually came as a bit of a surprise that it’s exactly 3 weeks till Christmas Day today, but that’s because my weeks are flying past me faster than I can keep up with at the moment. I have spent the week-end printing out the rest of my Christmas cards and I have ‘glitter-glue’ decorated and written about half of them. Both overseas parcels and Christmas cards are off to the post office later in the week, and that’s my Christmas shopping done :-)

18.08. Chicken Korma

Hello again, first of all, sorry for being off the net for such a long time! My recovery from the hip replacement operation is going very slowly and I just haven’t had the energy to sit down and write. Besides that, I haven’t had much to write about lately – as the weather has been pretty grim and I’ve hardly been out in my garden the last 10 days – hence no garden photos today. Yes, I know it’s August, and supposed to be the summer month of the year, but someone has messed up, again – and we have ended up with all the rain we didn’t get last winter. Ehhh…I would have preferred to have the rain back in February, thank you very much!

06.06. Homemade ice cream

Last Saturday I spent making ice cream, homemade ice cream – 10 litres of homemade ice cream! Actually, it wasn’t such a big job as it might sound, I did it in two batches, and each batch took only just over 30 minutes to make. So what do I need 10 litres of ice cream for? It’s actually not for me, it is for my son; it is a present for his 25th birthday which is on Friday, but don’t tell him – it’s supposed to be a surprise :-)

02.04. Honey Cake

Hi, how are you today? I made a promise yesterday that today’s post was going to be about something edible, with a subsequent recipe. As you probably have guessed from the title, the recipe is for a honey cake, one of my old favourites, and one I have baked many times. My father is very fond of this one too, unfortunately my parents live in Sothern Spain and I live in London, UK so I can’t just pop over to them with a cake now and then! But fortunately we have reasonably prices for sending small parcels, less than 2 kg, within Europe, so a couple of weeks ago I sent off 2 honey cakes with Southern Spain as the destination :-) I am pleased to report that the cakes have reached their destination without anyone en route feeling tempted to nick them...I suppose mobile phones might be more tempting to nick among the postal staff, but I am sure that in every warehouse these two parcels were stored, the staff could smell the cloves and the ginger coming from the parcels! By the way, mobile phones are no longer legal to send via British Royal Mail...precisely because so many “got lost in the post”, i.e. got nicked by the staff after having been X-rayed and the parcel content was revealed. The answer to the problem by Royal Mail has been to ban all mobile phones in ordinary parcels. Perishable food is also banned, but I don’t consider a cake perishable, obviously Royal Mail didn’t either, since they let them through the rigorous custom security check. Anyway, here is the recipe: