Return of the Black Forest

This is not a new addition to this blog I made this for the first time two years ago with the guidance of my mother. She has been making this for Christmas since I was a little girl and it is an amazing recipe . Tastes sooooo good, good old Delia!. Normally at Christmas we have this with blueberries and raspberries here I stuck to the traditional fruit of cherries.  I made this one for New Years day.

Black Forest Roulade

Think I'm becoming an expert, what do you think?!

Mincemeat!

After making my Christmas Pudding I had some left over products. What better way to use this up than to make some mincemeat! I had no idea that making mincemeat was so easy. I also have to admit that it was not my idea my house mate suggested it she was also kind enough to provide me with a cooking apple, extra dried fruit and some words of wisdom. All of which she just had lying around.

Soaking dried fruit

Over the Christmas period I picked up the Sainsbury's  Christmas magazine (always good for a gander!) and I stumbled upon this interesting recipe for Mincemeat Brownie Tart.  I personally am not a fan of mince pie's, I'm sure there are lost of people out there that feel the same, I have to say this was gorgeous.  I defiantly recommend it, its not to chocolaty and was amazingly moist all on it's own.

Chocolate brownie mincemeat Tart

I obviously had to also make some traditional mince pies. Nothing interesting with this recipe though!and they all went (after the brownie tart mind).

Mince Pies

Felted Ipod and tablet cover

Front of the Ipod cover

 A while back I started hunting in charity shops for wool jumpers so that I could experiment with machine felting. I have found it hard to source wool products as they tend to come in a percentage wool to another often man made fiber, which limits its felting capacity. This one was one of my own old tank tops and was 100% wool, because of this it felted really well on a 60'C wash with an old pair of jeans.

Back of the Ipod cover

 The tablet cover was made first using most of the jumper and the Ipod cover was made from the remnants as you have probably gathered. It was a patchwork cover and offered me an opportunity to use my Stitchopedia book which I greatly recommend it is a bible for embroidery, hear I used Blanket stitch in orange to add some definition and flatten the seams.

I have managed to find and felt some jumpers so there will be more to come on the machine felt front.

Christmas Pudding

 My first Be-Ro recipe in ages! I haven't had much time to bake over the last year a combination of moving, moving again, putting all my baking stuff in storage etc. You know it all just gets in the way, oh and an essential component for being able to post on your blog would be access to a computer, which I now have thanks to Santa.  Thanks Santa.

I was expecting Christmas pudding to be complicated, I was wrong, it's not..... This is the first steamed pudding I have made and I had no idea how I was supposed to steam a pudding. As I have recently moved I had limited cooking resources. I had to treat myself to an early Christmas present of a pudding tin, damn! hehe.

Anyway this simple recipe involves you mixing all the ingredients together and steaming them in a pudding dish. I used my slow cooker, which was not true to the recipe to do the steaming (sorry not being very authentic). But it was the only way I could think of doing it with what I had access to.

This is my well prepared pudding ready to be steamed, all I did was add boiling water to a pre-heated slow cooker up to approximately 2 inches and then leaving it overnight. I don't like fruit cake so I made this for a friend that feels that Christmas should involve Christmas pudding, hope it was nice and Happy Christmas.

Oh and I have eventually found my Be-Ro recipe book in the storage unit (it took me long enough! I was able to find this recipe on the Be-Ro webpage) so I plan on continuing working my way through the recipes. Yay