Easiest ‘baked’ gift ever!

Posted on 22 December 2010 by amandalindsey

This is such an easy and effective homemade Christmas gift for work colleagues etc.

Melt white chocolate, pour into an aluminum lined tray.

Scatter with chopped pistachios, dried cranberries and those little silver sugar balls. Then put it in the fridge and you get this:

Once it’s set break it up into pieces and you’re done!

You could also try using cookie cutters to cut shapes out of it when it’s not too cold.

More Christmas baking to come!

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Christmas Spirit!

Posted on 10 December 2010 by amandalindsey

Inspired by Sara’s piece on Christmas Spirit http://wonderland.starma.co.uk/?p=1556 I decided to get Baking!

Armed with the
Women’s Weekly
gingerbread recipe
and my trusty
brandy bottle
rolling pin I decided
that this years
Christmas gift was
to be Gingerbread
Christmas trees.
.
.
.

All you need is a set of different sized star cookie cutters:

For one Christmas tree cut out two of each size star. Make extra for other trees or in case you burn them like I did!

Once your gingerbread stars are out of the oven and have cooled lay them out in order (largest for the bottom):

Then stick them together with royal icing alternating the points of the stars:

Until you have a nice little tree shape like this:

Then use the royal icing to make pretty snow to cover your tree:

Add some christmas baubles and viola!

A simple concept and recipe and very effective!

A little time consuming though so in the end some people just got single stars with their name on it and ribbons through to hang as Christmas tree decorations:

Although I did learn that these are not the most effective gift if there is any chance of humidity. The gingerbread goes soft and falls off the ribbon… and sometimes the dog gets it.

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Stacey goes home!

Posted on 6 December 2010 by amandalindsey

After weetbix, soy milk and a raw egg for breakfast (she wasn’t impressed, but ate it anyway) we took our stray to the after hours vet for scanning.

They scanned her & she was microchipped YAY! Good start. The vet nurse double and triple checked her number and after calling all the databases let us know that unfortunately while microchipped, our stray’s details hadn’t been registered.

After a run, (she was going mad in our tiny little apartment, definitely not an apartment dog!) we took her home and I went straight across the road to the shops with some dodgy handmade FOUND posters.

As soon as I had put the shopping down we got a call from a very distraught young man whose dog had got out. The poor fellow, who lives two houses down from our unit block, had been up till two in the morning sick with worry about her.

We took her straight over and returned her to her relieved people, who are going out directly to get a tag engraved for her!

A happy ending to Stacey’s adventure 🙂

And the moral of this story is…. if you have your pet microchipped follow-up and ensure that your details get put into the register AND always have a proper collar and name tag with your details on your pet. It makes it much easier to get them back to you quicker.

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