There is nothing better than going to pick your own Christmas Tree. It’s even better to pick your own tree from where it is growing and have it cut down before your very eyes. I have vague recollections of me doing this once before when I was a child – with my Dad, my brother [...]
Few things in life give greater pleasure to a basset than a pile of mud. A place to put their pudgy paws and indulge in a spot of sniffing or digging. The softer the mud the better it is but as mud goes they’ll pretty much take anything. With the construction of the kitchen garden [...]
Just as I think I’m learning the lessons of building and living in the country something comes along and makes me realise I’m such an amateur. Despite my best efforts to think ahead and have a plan for every eventuality something always happens. Something that makes me feel sick that I didn’t see it coming [...]
There is nothing more satisfying seeing a building project come to fruition. Especially when its not me doing the building. The kitchen garden construction has really taken shape although for a moment I think that the plans must have been misread. I was struggling to understand where the idea for building a castle like tower [...]
With howling winds and incessant rain this weekend the wintry atmosphere you could be forgiven in thinking that we were heading into a northern rather than a southern hemisphere Christmas. To cheer us up we cooked up a batch of a wonderfully spicy biscuit that has a warming effect. I became a convert to Lebkuchen during [...]
The illusions you get during a building project are deceiving and can make your dream project into a living nightmare. I recall the sheer panic the first time I saw the house foundations and saw we were building something the size of a sports stadium. It wasn’t a patch on the heart palpitations I had [...]
I’ve traditionally created my own ritual of stir up Sunday for my Christmas Cake baking. This usually involves staying up late on Christmas Eve to take the cake out of the oven, stashing the cake until Boxing Day and then icing it just in time for people to politely refuse cake on the grounds they [...]
If there was ever a name to grab my baking attention – Fat Rascals has to be up there at the top of the list. It’s cheeky and fun yet describes perfectly this scone dressed as a cake. How this name came about is a mystery but the cakes have been made famous by Betty’s [...]
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