Yule and gift-giving

Over the years, my family has worked our way towards a more home-made, hand-made gift-giving tradition. This is in part financial (the Jones's we are not), but it is also because working on gifts through the year, putting energy into them, is infinitely more satisfying than going and buying some miscellaneous item (thoughtful though it may be) that happens to fall in your price range.

This doesn't mean we don't buy items. Honestly, about half our gifting in any one year is purchased, particularly items within our household, but i think this is in part because the handmade goods get given within the house throughout the year.

one gift some of our family and friends can expect this year is pictured below:

orange and cherry fondants, with the small centre bits of chocolate covered candied ginger

candied ginger and eggnog fondant

coffee, peppermint, and chocolate flavours

this was all made with one batch of filling, and the recipe for it is on joybilee farm.

all told, i made over 3 pounds of chocolates!!!

one recipe i improvised was for the coffee flavored filling. i used the following:
1tbsp Kahlua
1/2 tbsp instant coffee

to note with many of the filling recipes: some are too dry, and need extra butter (or a few drops of water)
and the rest are too moist, and need extra icing sugar. but they all taste wonderful!


oh, and one more thing:  here's the finished super-secret gift for you to see:

asymmetrically striped dogswool/wool mitts

and for music today, here is a page with a number of songs, most containing an audio file. lots of nice variants on old standards!
http://www.odins-gift.com/mp3/suiteofyulesongs.htm.

Happy spring!

Hopefully everyone is enjoying their early spring... wether it is under two feet of snow, or amongst early blooms.
Here in the Canadian prairies we've got lots of grey and brown, with banks of lingering dirty white... no green in sight yet!

We celebrated Ostara on the weekend with our littles... which included lots of eggs and treats

i had prepared treat-filled cascarone-styled eggs, as well as plastic eggs for hunting. Both kids got a HUGE kick out of searching out the eggs with small baskets, then dumping them into the big basket! After everyone had breakfast we took turns opening/crushing eggs to find the treasures inside. the fillings i used included small toys, chocolate eggs, fortunes, juice-based candies, and coins for our rewards system.

The last couple days i've spent planting seeds and watching my seedlings grow.

My daughter and i planted small pots of radishes and mesclun to grown on the windowsill...

and i repotted my unidentified mint....i think it's catnip, but it could be a crossbreed

as for works in progress, i'm slowly working on a play mat for the kids.. it will be farm-centric but similar to those 'roads and cities' playmats you can buy commercially.

this is the pattern i'm using... the orange bit is the part i've finished thus far

it's quite a bit larger in real life

so what have you planned or already started for Spring? are there plants growing? plans for fresh paint? or something even more ambitious? let me know!

when you give a mouse a cookie...

you know how sometimes when you try to do something, it just snowballs?

Last night, i decided to make a batch of shortbread to bring to a potluck meal we're having with some acquaintances.

this morning, i decide that chocolate dipped shortbread would be a much nicer offering, so i go and melt a pot of chocolate

i dip all the pieces i wanted, but i still have a ton of chocolate left
do i throw it out? (c'mon... i don't even throw out food i don't like, and this is CHOCOLATE!)
no... so i decide to dip some dried apricots in it... they turn out quite nicely....
hmm... still a lot of chocolate left...
what to do?

i decide to make 'cukoo's bits' ... although i never use the same recipe twice..

so now, instead of a pan of shortbread, i have:
plain shortbread
chocolate dipped shortbread
chocolate dipped apricots (incidentally, these are very tasty!)
and about a dozen cukoo's bits cookies.

yeah... things snowballed.

but that's okay. i used up all the chocolate!!!



so, if you ever have leftover chocolate (fondue dip works too!) one way to use it up is

Cukoo's bits

leftover melted chocolate?

add to the chocolate any cereal of your choice (i use cheerios)
note: add it one handful at a time, and stir in between. once it's becoming hard to get all the bits of cereal coated, stop adding more!

drop by spoonfuls onto waxed paper, and let cool.

note: you can also add nuts or rasins to the mixture if you like, just add them instead of one of the handfuls of cereal


easy peasy.

sure, you could melt chocolate specifically to make these, but there are more professional recipes out there for that... with actual measurements and such.