Christmas

I hope you all had a wonderful Christmas? Spending time with family and friends is what Christmas is all about for me. Times full of fun, giggles and games, lots of them! From Charades to Caption it, from New Market to Tsuro, and of course for our family, the whistle game, so many times it has made us laugh, and when I say laugh I mean LAUGH!  Of course there is also the food and the drink, and probably too much of both. Christmas food to me is everything from sprouts, chestnuts, parsnips to Christmas cake, after dinner mints and lots more chocolate!

We spent Christmas at my parents house with my sister and her fiance and we had none stop fun, in fact I can't believe how Christmas day just flies by, before we knew it, boxing day had appeared and we were still playing charades!

So what did the Christmas dinner bring for me? Well I was meant to take a photograph, but unfortunately when it came too dinner I was so desperate to tuck in that I forgot all about it! We started with the Chestnut and Mushroom Soup, but instead of using the vegan cream I used rice milk to make it a little less rich. My main dinner was heaped high with veg from the parsnip and butternut bake to a serving of sprouts, carrots, cauliflower, mash potato, roast potato, stuffing and a field mushroom wellington, which I found on the BBC Good Food website. However, as always I completely changed the recipe to my taste, of course the cheese was removed and replaced with a little of the mushroom and chestnut soup, I swapped the spinach for kale and the egg wash for a wash of rice milk. The verdict - delicious! There was way too much food on my plate, I couldn't face a dessert!

Some of you will have noticed that I haven't mentioned presents yet. We decided as a family that this year we weren't going to go mad, previous years we have been known to spend hours opening gift after gift, a little extravagant to say the least. So this year we bought practical gifts, tickets to shows or events so we had something to look forward to and homemade gifts.

I want to focus on the homemade gifts that my sister and I made each other. My sister made me a vegan hamper which was full of lots of gorgeous and scrummy food and drink. It included a Christmas cake, strawberry chocolate cupcakes, date truffles, peanut butter & chocolate cookies and a bottle of limoncello. Delicious! The peanut butter & chocolate cookies were the first to go, and that surprised me, as regular readers will know I'm not a massive fan of peanut butter, but times are changing!

My gifts focused on upcycling and I made my sister a cake stand, which you can also see in the photograph above, with an orange chocolate cup cake and a bracelet made from her favourite colour, green ribbon and coke can ring pulls, yes really! 

I love receiving handmade/homemade gifts and I also had another fabulous homemade gift from my gardening angel, raspberry vodka, which is delicious!