Boxing Day plans....

Being a greedy sort of family, we generally have TWO feast meals over Christmas. On Christmas Day, it is the traditional roast turkey with all the trimmings. On Boxing Day, we have a huge baked ham with new potatoes, roast parsnips, something fresh and green that we didn't have on Christmas Day (probably broccoli, it depends what's available), parsley sauce AND Cumberland Sauce. And we follow it with the mince pies and brandy butter that we didn't have room for  the day before.

Cumberland  Sauce, if you haven't come across it before, can be made quite simply by heating together roughly equal quantities of port, redcurrant jelly and orange juice together until the redcurrant jelly melts and dissolves into the liquid, then cooling to room temperature.

As for the gammon, we always have it with a richly caramelised brown sugar and mustard crust.

To make the coating, boil or roast the ham in your preferred way and then just before it is fully cooked, remove it from the oven and strip off the skin and most of the fat, then score the remaining fat into diamonds. Stick a clove into the centre of each diamond and then spread a thick layer of Dijon mustard over the whole surface and press as much Demerara sugar as will stick on to it all over the surface.
Then put the ham in a foil lined baking tray (if you don't use the foil, you'll end up throwing the baking tray away!) and put into a fiercely hot oven for around 30 minutes until you have a nice glossy caramelised surface. Stand and serve in your usual preferred way.

Here are the parsnips we had last year - home grown ones!

And then mince pies to follow (sorry about the tiny photo, Blogger is stubbornly refusing to allow me to resize it. I'll try again in a day or two when hopefully it isn't being such a sulky Blogger)

 

I'm joining in with Food Friday at Carole's Chatter

Great candy at Studio 12

Studio 12 at Polkadoodles has a £50 goody bag to give away this month, including CDs, stamps, promarkers and embellishments - follow the link to see how to join in!

Food Glorious Food

No, this isn't a recipe post (really must get back in the kitchen, but this cold wet weather turns me into a "meat and two veg" woman and that isn't awfully creative) but yet another craft one. Yes, I'm having a lovely weekend crafting - so very relaxing and it stops me from looking at the saturated ground outside and sighing!

I'm really enjoying making this year's Christmas cards as I've gone in for such a wide variety of styles. I've been making them all yesr too, so what a pity I've only recently found the Winter Wonderland blog.

Anyway, I've found and followed them now and this week's challenge is Food Glorious Food. To my surprise, the only Christmas food themed goodies I had were a Christmas Pudding stamp and backing paper, so here is my take on the theme. I am entering it into the Food Glorious Food! challenge at Winter Wonderland

Singing the Blues

Several of my friends and family have birthdays in December - several MALE ones. And I need to make cards for them. I can hear 90%  of you groaning - cards for men are so hard to make, especially men who don't like the traditional male card themes of booze, sport and fishing. But all the men in my family appreciate landscapes, and I like to create a wintry looking scene that isn't specifically a Christmas card. I reckon that way they can sneakily carry on displaying their birthday cards right through Christmas and make it look as if they had more Christmas cards than usual!

 

So here is a card I have made with that in mind. I die cut the circle and stamped the scene, then masked off the scene and the card below it and  also a circle for the moon. Then I sponged two shades of blue ink over the circle and blended them with horizontal strokes of a watercolour brush to create a wintry looking sky. Finally I highlighted the snow with touches of holographic glitter to reflect the blue.

I am submitting this to
 CAS-ual Fridays CFC79 Winter Blues
Addicted to Stamps and More CAS challenge 4
Addicted to Clean And Simple ATCAS #1 Snow

Glamour and Glitz

With this card, I am joining in two challenges:

Less is More - 95 - recipe: Glamour and Glitz
Oldie  But a Goodie - Anything Goes

When I think of Glamour and Glitz, the very LAST thing I think about is "Clean and simple". My instinct is to pile on the bling! But of course glamour means fashion too, and I remembered some old peel-offs I bought when I first started cardmaking about 15 years ago.

Isn't it funny, as crafting newbies there is a temptation to rush out and buy armfuls of peel offs. Then you get them home and wonder what the heck to do with them! Once you are an established crafter, you find that the ones you use most often are borders, corners and words, yet you can't bring yourself  to part with those early purchases.

So this dress is definitely an oldie but a goodie. In fact I think it is a great credit to the manufacturer  that after all this time the adhesive on it still works as well as if it had been brand new.

Actually everything on this card is at least a year old. The grey card I used for the band across the middle was also one of my first purchases, I just KNEW it was going to come in handy one day. The paper I used for the dress was from a prize I won from a craft magazine last year, and the pink glitter card from a bundle I won last year. The shoes are from a RAK I received the Christmas before last and the sentiment was a freebie in a craft magazine absolutely years ago. Everything comes in useful if you hang on to it for long enough!

CASology #20 - Gobble

The cue card this week at CASology is GOBBLE. Now here in England, very few of us celebrate Thanksgiving,  so the whole turkey thing doesn't happen. Well, it does, but at Christmas, and we  tend to go for snowflakes, robins and penguins (why penguins? Santa lives at the North Pole, penguins at the South Pole. There is, quite literally, a whole world of difference!) on our Christmas cards.

So if I wasn't going to use a bird that goes "Gobble! Gobble!" or a Thanksgiving feast on my card, what COULD I use? What do most of us love to gobble?

CAKE!!!!

So here is my interpretation of the cue card. With hindsight, I should have made the band across the card a few millimetres lower down. Looking at the photo,  it looks as if I was trying to get it across the exact middle and failed, when in real life it definitely looks  as if it's where I planned it to go  noticeably below the centre!

I'm joining on with this week's  challenge at CAS-ology

Less is More 94 - Hardware

When I saw that this week's theme at Less is More  was hardware, I knew exactly what I wanted to make. I have some brads that look like screw heads and some decoupage of retro style ladies doing DIY. I would use the brads to attach a strip of woodgrain effect paper down one side of a cream card, then use the decoupage design to overlap the woodgrain and the white space.

But I looked in my brad box and there was no sign of the brads. I spent half of yesterday afternoon turning my craft stash upside down in search of the brads. Not a sign of them. "Never mind", I thought, "I'll use the decoupage and wood grain anyway, with some plain brads". So I opened my folder to remove the decoupage sheet - and found it bereft of designs apart from a couple of useful looking borders.

Yep, I'd already made the card  I had in mind for a male birthday last year, using up the brads and decoupage. No wonder I could picture it so clearly!

But while I was  searching for the missing bits of stash, I came across a box of metallic embellishments left over from a Hot Off The Press Christmas kit from several years ago - parcels, words, Christmas trees and reindeer, along with some bow and star brads for holding them in place. I don't know why I didn't use them at the time - I think they are so cute they need little else to set them off. Here are a couple of cards I've made with them.