Making Christmas sweets with the kids

I have been attempting to continue Christmas crafting with the kids and today we made a few sweet treats for friends and family. We had a go at marzipan fruits, but I think I had the wrong type of food colouring and it wasn't going very well. We decided to make most of the marzipan into snowmen instead and they turned out much better than the fruit.

We had much more success with chocolate truffles. These were so easy and they are delicious. The ones rolled in icing sugar don't look great as the sugar has absorbed the moisture from the truffle, but the cocoa ones and the chocolate flake ones look good.

Here's the recipe...

Heat up 175ml of double cream in a saucepan until it boils and then pour it into a mixing bowl containing 225g Dark chocolate (chopped up) and stir it until all the chocolate has melted (I also added 2 tsp of Cointreau at this point, but I could have added a bit more). Leave this to cool and set. I did this the day before and left it in the fridge over night.

Use teaspoons to take a small amount of the chocolate ganache out of the bowl and roll it in some cocoa powder or some chocolate flakes.

Here are our little trays of sweets wrapped up and ready to go.

Happy Christmas!

A Father Christmas card

I've started having a a little look at Pinterest and I can see how time can slip away looking at all the great ideas that are shared on there. I saw the idea for this card on there and thought it was so great that we had to have a go. The original link is here. My girls made some for their teachers and for their grandparents. They are so effective.

An artsy ornament

I signed up a while ago to an online class called "12 Artsy Ornaments for Christmas". It's hosted by Christy Tomlinson and has a selection of artists contributing projects, including two of my favourites - Donna Downey and Alisa Burke.

This was my version of Alisa's project and I've made a few for friends. I love how they turned out. When my six year old said she wanted to give presents to some of her school friends, I showed her the tutorial video and she had a go too. She made some very pretty hearts.

A Peg Angel

I am still crafting like crazy catching up with sewing embroidered cotton shopping bags for church and a couple of commission bird bags too. Yesterday I realised I've used up a 1000m reel of thread in about three weeks - now that's a lot of sewing! I'm also trying my best to get crafty with the kids, particularly as Christmas is such a great time for making and so this weekend we made presents for the girls' teachers. This year we have made peg doll angels to hang on a Christmas tree ( I just need to tie on a ribbon loop so they can hang up).

I used some small paper doilies for the skirt and we coloured bits of another doily in silver for the wings. The bodice is made from a piece of ribbon and the arms are a pipecleaner wrapped around the neck.

The girls drew on the faces with felt tips and this is the smiliest one. My younger daughter drew on a hilarious face saying "Look Mummy , this is an angry angel!" The doll has fringed paper hair and a tinsel pipecleaner halo.

I am hoping to get most of my sewing done this week and I am glad I took the decision not to make presents for the children I knitted toys for last year. I think it would have been a step too far! This year I have bought each of them one of our favourite books. It's called "Stuck" by Oliver Jeffers ( who is my favourite kids author). We particularly like the main character who is a little boy with ginger hair - my little ginger boy is very pleased by this.