Fearless in Seattle: Christmas!

Our twine trees and presents sitting on the beautiful christmas table

Getting ready for Christmas

Somehow in my present state getting ready for things takes almost as much time as doing the thing itself. We got ready for Christmas by making a few twine christmas trees and bows and admiring all our neighbours for getting out in the rain, braving the terrible mix of water and electricity and putting up Christmas lights.

We really have no excuse, since we don't traditionally buy presents for each other and we opted out of a tree this year, our house should have looked like Rockefellar square. Instead it's the lonely one on the corner with the slightly dead looking trees. Hence our motto.....maybe next year.

Nat and I spent a day of crafting Christmas table decorations including a bauble for each person at Gill and Simon's family Christmas...including the dogs. We used glue pens and fine glitter and were quite happy for our first attempt. We then packed them into Chrissy themed Chinese food cartons. We also made extra twine trees for the center of the table. It was a long day of crafting and I still suspect there's some glitter hanging about the kitchen table.

Personalised baubles for all the Christmas guests

Christmas cooking

Presents

I wanted to give our new found friends a little something for Christmas. Since I do enjoy a dabble in the kitchen, a box of baked goodies sounded like the best idea. I made vanilla marshmallows (pink and green in the absense of red and green), lemon melting moments (I prefer passionfruit but I had one tin and it had to be put to another use) and some macarons. The macarons were a bit sad. I wanted to make them pink and green and added a toothpick worth of food colouring, it went all pear-shaped. I'm still not 100% with the oven and it's various elements so will have to keep working at that one. At least they tasted okay even if they looked meh.

Desserts

Nat and I got assigned desserts again for Christmas after successfully filling everyone with sugar at Thanksgiving. We made

cake pops
sticky date pudding (in place of traditional pudding)
a meringue log with berries, white chocolate and passionfruit
apple pie and apple berry crumble with vanilla bean custard
chocolate friands and
pumpkin cheesecakes....again

I borrowed Ryan and Rose's cake pop pan to make the pops and they kindly send over the specially recommended grease spray. I sprayed it, baked the pops and popped them in the freezer so I could return the pan. While wandering around the kitchen two days before Christmas I suddenly had a brainwave....the pam spray that I had used had been specially recommended because it contained flour. Non-gluten free flour....the cake-pops we'd made with gluten free cake, were ready to coat with gluten free candy mix and sprinkles were covered with non-gluten free flour.....gah! At least I remembered before I fed them to our poor gluten intolerant friends!

The doomed cake pops

We had another epic day of baking, including an experimental meringue log which was quite successful. We ended up with 9 egg yolks after baking meringue and friands and we discovered that it's very hard to cut decorative shapes out of gluten free pastry. Nuwan had the toughest day of all, he just had to keep testing....and testing and testing the food. At one point, realising that there was 3 less people coming to lunch we each decided that we should try a sticky date pudding after lunch.

By the end of the day I was quite pooped! I imagine the ovens were too, they were running at full tilt for most of the day. I had an early night, to make sure we could make the most of the planned FEAST and boy was it a feast.

Christmas day

We were kind of hoping for snow on Christmas but woke up to rain instead...lots of it! But we're getting properly acclimatised now and we take no heed of the rain.

Nat, myself and Rose

Myself, Nataliya, Gill, Rose

The boys; Nuwan, Evgeny, Simon and Ryan

Lovely Gill with her mum and sister

Mitch looking uber-cool in his birthday present

We arrived at Gill and Simon's on Christmas morning lugging everything but the kitchen sink....and 2 gallons of milks (more on that later). We had desserts, we had presents and we had serving dishes to boot. We set up our desserts and watched Simon and his BIL Mike do magic in the kitchen. Simon and Gill each had their sisters and families staying. Gill's mum was there too.
Since the fridge was packed to the brim with food, Simon and Nuwan determined that the milk was actually better off outside where it was just above freezing. Definitely colder than in the fridge.

The beautiful Christmas table

What's Christmas without baubles everywhere

We sat down to an amazing meal of turkey and ham, accompanied by roasted pumpkin, potato baked, stuffing, brussel sprouts and carrots. There was gravy, mustard, chutney, vinegar and even cranberry sauce. We didn't even bother heating up the desserts while lunch was cooking.....that's how much time we expected to spend eating. Everything was delicious and I must say, thanks to Simon....I'm a proper fan of turkey now.

Our delicious lunch

We bought out dessert quite a while later and Gill and Rose washed and wiped the lunch plates....judging the small side plates to be insufficient for our eating needs. We ate dessert almost for as long as we ate lunch....and still there was more left.