Merry Christmas!

Merry Christmas!

I hope you have a wonderful few days filled with family, friends, smiles and laughter!

Our Christmas starts tonight with a special meal followed by extra special hot chocolate topped with gingerbread houses!

And tomorrow we will be tucking into our Christmas cake, made by Mum, decorated by me!

I hope you have a truly special day tomorrow!

Love Rebecca

Festive Iced Sugar Cookies

Have you been seeing these royal icing iced sugar cookies all over the blogosphere this year?
I absolutely love the cookies over at Lizy B and have been wanting to try my hand at some cookies for a while. 

These are my first attempt...what do you think?

It took me a few hours but I swear it was the most relaxing evening I have had in ages! 

I had Taylor Swift blasting out and time just flew!

I am looking forward to making some more iced sugar cookies in the new year!

On another note, you may have noticed that I have neatened up the side bar on my blog, hopefully, I have made it easier for you navigate my blog! 

I will also me working on organising my tutorial pages over the next few days! There have been several adjustments I have wanted to make for a while now but simply have not had the time!

I hope you are all enjoying the holidays. 

We just spent the evening watching White Christmas, whilst enjoying hot chocolate and mince pies! Perfection!

Love Rebecca

Its the most wonderful time of the year...

We put up our tree yesterday and our house is now looking very festive!

Our tree has been built up over the years and is now officially a tree of memories, laden with decorations that we have been given, or we made as children or bought over the years.

So, I got my camera out and played around with taking pictures of our Christmas tree.

Yesterday, I finished my Christmas shopping and for the rest of the week, I will be enjoying some other Christmas-sy activities!

Today, I am ice skating, and on Wednesday my Mum and I are seeing Nativity 2 at the cinema!

What Christmas activities are you up to this week?

Love Rebecca

Storybook Crafts Project - Father Christmas Cushion

There are less than two weeks now until Christmas - how exciting! And my week is going really well, my to-do list is almost complete and I have got a first draft of my assignment that is due after the Christmas hols!

A couple of weeks ago, the Storybook Craft Project was The Snowman by Raymond Briggs. This week, it is Father Christmas by Raymond Briggs. I love the illustrations in these books and, as I am feeling mighty festive, was very keen to make a Father Christmas inspired cushion. 

This is a simple enough cushion, it was only complicated for me by my sewing machine's dislike of leatherette meaning that I had to hand sew my belt in place, but oh well! I found a Top Gear special and got on with it!

Materials

1/2m Red Fleece

Brown Leatherette

Yellow Fabric

Coordinating Thread

1. Cut out a 14"x14" square and two 14"x9" rectangles from your red fleece

2. Cut a strip of brown leatherette 3" by 15"

3. Line up the leatherette in the centre of your fleece square and sew across the top and bottom to make the belt (hand sew or machine - which ever you prefer)

4. Cut a strip of yellow, 3 1/2" x 24" (or two strips of shorter length)

5. Fold strip in half, right sides together and sew down the long edge. Turn right way out and press down the middle as shown. 

6. Cut the strips so your have two 6 1/2" long and two 3 1/2" long. Fold in the ends to get a neat hem and press (you should now have two 6" and two 3" strips)

7. Position the strips as in the picture to form Father Christmas's buckle. Pin in place and sew all the way round the inside and outside of the buckle. Sew down any other loose seams. Make sure you use a yellow thread to blend in!

8. Take your fleece rectangles, hem one long edge on each. Line up the rectangles and square front, right sides together to form an envelope back.

9. Sew all the way round the cushion cover, turn right side out.

Join me next week for the last Storybook Crafts Project before Christmas!

Love Rebecca

Monday Morning Video - Christmas Movies

Don't you just love this time of year? 

I am feeling very festive and am looking forward to watching my favourite Christmas movies...

1. Miracle on 34th Street - a classic film that I could watch every year! (P.S. I believe!)

2. White Christmas - THE ultimate Christmas film! This film is packed with brilliant songs perfect for a festive  evening by the fire! This film will never get old!

3. Nativity - what could be better than this feel good flick about a British primary school's nativity performance - the songs are hilarious and the kids are adorable!

What is your favourite Christmas movie?

Love Rebecca

Gingerbread House and other Cooking

With December officially upon us, my friend Tori and I had our traditional gingerbread making session making this Gingerbread house at the weekend! It was a brilliantly fun afternoon, listening to Christmas tunes and building our little cottage. We used this recipe from Art of Dessert which creates a deliciously flavoursome egg free gingerbread!

My new recipe of the week was this Healthy Egg and Chips from bbcgoodfood.com

However, I wasn't particularly enamoured with this meal, I found it very bland and although easy, I would not make it again. If, after that glowing recommendation (!) you would like to try it, I have added the link above!

How is your week going? I am still manically busy with University and I think it has finally started to catch up with me -I am definitely ready for the end of term (10 days!) Cannot wait to go home for Christmas!

I finished the 4th Harry Potter on Monday (that's the first four read in less than 2 1/2 weeks!) and am completely head over heels fallen in love with everything Harry Potter once more! 

Have you discovered a love of something recently? Or do you just share my love for HP?

Hope you are enjoying your week!

Love Rebecca

Christmas Buns

My brother is coming home today from Belgium which gives me the perfect to bake a batch of Christmas buns from the December 2011 issue of Good Food Magazine.

These were easy to make, you just have to plan ahead a little in order to make them in time as they require about 1 1/2 hours rising time and then 20-25 minutes in the oven! But they taste oh soooo good! That amazing cinnamon, fruity, sweet flavour in the bread! We decided that they tasted good enough as they were and didn't need the extra icing sugar drizzle that the recipe suggests.

Can't wait for later when we can have one (although we did split one between three of us for a mid afternoon snack - they were fresh from the oven so it would have been wrong not to give them a try!)

This afternoon was spent cooking in general really! Over Christmas, we have special meals on Christmas Eve with my brother and his girlfriend and on Boxing day with my Great Aunt. So my Dad and I got busy in the kitchen today preparing the desserts for those meals! Both are from Jame Oliver's new book about Great British food! On Christmas eve we are having the Winter Pudding Bombe and on Boxing day the Retro Arctic Roll. Both are ready to go, just chillin' in the freezer until they are needed!

PS. Just 2 full days left until Christmas!

Love Rebecca

Melting Snowmen

So, using some of the sugar cookie dough left over from the Harry Potter cookies, I made melting snowmen inspired by these on Truly Custom Bakery.  I found them about a month ago and knew I had to try them but its taken me this long to get around to it!
A few words of advice and ways I deviated from the method suggested on the original recipe.

1. I made a thick white icing for the snow (Simply icing sugar and water mixed together until I got the right consistency)

2. The marshmallows - such issues were had here! It takes about 5-6 seconds in the microwave for the marshmallow to be the right consistency. Any more (literally half a second more seems to be too much!) and it is unusable gloop! This was slightly more of an issue in that I could only buy a pack of marshmallows that contained pink and white marshmallows - and I obviously couldn't have a pink snowman! So, I recommend one marshmallow at a time, microwave for 5 seconds to try it and see how it works - it will depend on the strength of your microwave.

3. I used writing icing for the details which worked well and gave me a lot more control for the features.

Despite the marshmallow issues I am really pleased with the results! I even wrapped up a couple to give as presents - after all who wouldn't want a melted snowman for Christmas!

Love Rebecca

Linked in the Christmas Cookie Exchange @ The Grant Life 
Linked up @ Positively Splendid

Happy 1st December

Its officially December which means we are well and truly in the run up to Christmas! My mum went to a quilt exhibition recently at a local community centre and told me about these fabric Christmas trees she had seen there. After googling it to find out how they were done we found a tutorial on The Pursuit of Happiness.
I found some festive holly fabric at Boyes for 4.59 a metre and bought half a metre to try it out! The result is a cute Christmas tree that was very easy to make - the most time consuming but was sewing up the bottom after stuffing it but if you put Love Actually on in the background it doesn't seem to take that long! The tutorial is great, the only thing I did was print the half of the template on one A4 page and the other half on another to get the right size tree.

Christmas Tree

I also made a second tree for my friend Tori who came over yesterday. Last year we made gingerbread men before Christmas, this year we took it one step further and made mini gingerbread houses. I have not have much luck in the past with gingerbread houses - although very delicious, I could never get the roof to stay on! I hoped that making them on a smaller scale might help - and whatever it was, these houses worked!

Gingerbread Creations

 I made the gingerbread dough using this recipe from Art of Dessert so that my housemate Holly (who is allergic to egg) could still eat them. The only changes I made was using brown sugar instead of white and golden syrup (I live in England and have no idea where to get corn syrup!). One batch made enough for two small houses, 5 trees, 2 snowmen, 4 rocking horses, 3 stars, 2 hearts and a moon. Tori was in charge of decoration supplies and turned up with chocolate buttons, mini marshmallows, jelly diamonds, purple glitter and pink sprinkles!
We also made the egg free royal icing suggested with the gingerbread recipe which worked well as glue. My house has a cheeky Oreo in the middle which was there to support the walls! We spent a great couple of hours listening to Christmas tunes whilst we made our houses. These are SO much fun seriously -give it a go!

My House

Tori's House

Love Rebecca