Christmas Day

I’m a day late with this post but I don’t seem to have had much time to myself. As you can see we’ve had the family home for Christmas, our two boys and Laura, Gordon’s girlfriend who is as much like a daughter to us as anyone could be as they’ve been going out with each other since they were just 17 and she stayed a lot with us when they were students as she was an English student, coming from Rochdale but at Uni in Stirling so we were her local base.

We had turkey and ham with lots of roasted veggies and yes sprouts which Jack and I love anyway but this time I used the Jamie Oliver shredded sprout recipe with bacon.
Duncan, Gordon and Laura

How solemn do we all look? We had fun, honestly!

Christmas Day Table

Believe it or not, I had never made a trifle before and I put this one together, not bothering with a recipe. Next time I’ll use more jelly and less custard I think. I used a shop bought Swiss roll for the first layer then topped it with strawberries and jelly then custard and cream with strawberries topped with grated chocolate. Very tasty.

Strawberry trifle

Just so that we had a choice of puddings I also made chocolate cheesecake based on Lorraine Pascale’s recipe which you can see here. I tweaked her recipe slightly. Instead of all chocolate digestives I made a third of them Amaretto biscuits to make a more interesting combination and I did the cheesecake in two layers, the first of which was all mixed in very well and the second layer was just roughly mixed to leave some of the cream cheese unmixed which made the flavour better I think as I like a bit of a surprise in each spoonful. As you can see I had a bit of a disaster with my piping nozzle thingy and ended up scraping the melted chocolate out onto the melted milk chocolate instead of having a beautifully feathered decoration. In future I’m not going to bother faffing about with the melted chocolate on top as the cheesecake is nice enough without it I think.

Chocolate Cheesecake

Boxing Day is always a rest for me as it’s the leftover ham and turkey made into a pie which takes no time to throw together. For some reason the pastry has shrunk away from the edges of my pie dish but it tasted fine.

Turkey and Ham Pie

So that’s it all over for another year. Now for Hogmanay!