Showing posts with label royal icing. Show all posts
Showing posts with label royal icing. Show all posts

Friday, 6 January 2012

Christmas!

It's taken a while, but I'm finally getting round to posting photos of my Christmas feast. We decided to have it at home this time, and celebrated it on Christmas Eve with the delightful Miss Kitty Valentine, my cushion-making partner in crime Aldona and her family.

In true over-the-top Polish tradition, our dinner consisted of at least 12 dishes (since I'm not actually Polish, I don't know if it is true that a Polish Christmas dinner has to include 12 dishes, it's just what I've been told.) 
The coffee table had an array of sweets - (from top), homemade panforte, a quince, ginger and walnut cake based on this recipe, and some untraditionally shaped gingerbread biscuits (gingerbread T-rex, anyone?). Aldona also brought along some makowiec (poppyseed cake) and more biscuits.
The star of the night, a perfectly roasted goose! Manbacon (who can be partially seen behind the bird) cooked the goose himself, following a great recipe by the Hairy Bikers. He also managed to rustle up succulent salt beef, as well as plenty of delicious apple and pork stuffing. 

£10 notes to wipe our greasy hands and lips on, because we're hedonists and filthy rich. You can't see it, but we also had a stack of £20 and £50 note-napkins. 
Wild mushroom dumplings in beetroot soup (above), as well as some bigos, plenty of cured pork products, some marinated herrings, and possibly some other stuff as well. 
The aftermath - empty vodka bottles, half-finished bowls of soups and stews, burnt-out candles, crumpled napkins and wrapping paper, plenty of half-eaten food, and one stained tablecloth. Our guests were sent away with boxes stuffed full of food. 

Thursday, 1 January 2009

Dyslexic Santa

What do you do with a discounted, build-it-yourself gingerhouse house kit from Kfart? Well, you can always make a gingerbread house for New Year's Eve...

The kit came with a bag of 'Royal Icing' mixture, and also 'The Best Piping Bag In the World' - which Goggy and I got pretty damned excited about. It turned out to be an above average piping bag.
To get the lovely pyschedelic colours of our icing, just add some pink and blue dye after you've spooned the icing into the piping bag. That way, the colours don't get to mix together evenly and you get swirly bits of colour.
We also added a touch too much water plus it was a stinking hot day, which is why the icing turned out slightly goopy. Try not to let a dyslexic get their hands on the piping bag though, they might end up misspelling 'Santa'.
Make sure to decorate the outside of the house with all of the hundreds-and-thousands and Smarties provided with the kit.
Happy 1976, everybody!