When I was growing up, a few days after Christmas, my dad’s side of the family would have a Christmas gathering of our own. It wasn’t often when we would all get together (my dad had four siblings, and all of them had 2-3 kids, along with my grandparents, etc, which made it hard for EVERYONE to be able to get together at any one given time), but most of the family made an effort to be around on Christmas.

Every year, my grandmother would make dessert – both Christmas pudding and English Trifle. Because the Christmas pudding was always such a favourite among her children (my parents, aunts & uncles), she made additional small Christmas puddings for each family to take home with them. My father would always put his pudding into the freezer until the following year on Christmas day.

As with most people when they start getting older, my grandmother’s memory started going… which posed a problem, as she always made the recipes from scratch and never wrote them down. One year when this started happening, she spent a day with a couple of my aunts to teach them how she made the Christmas pudding. I think the plan was that they would take over making the pudding from her. Unfortunately, neither of the aunts ended up writing down the recipe either, and have since forgotten how exactly my grandmother made it… but that particular year, when my aunts helped my grandmother, was a bit of a special treat for those who got a taste of the pudding.

Like some recipes for Christmas pudding, my grandmother always added alcohol (brandy, I believe) to her pudding. During the year she was teaching my aunts, my grandmother added the alcohol without letting either of the aunts know that she was doing so. Then both of my aunts proceeded to add the required amount of alcohol, both sure that it had been overlooked by my grandmother and the other aunt that was there. Needless to say, when it came time to eat the pudding that year, it certainly packed a bit of a punch… and the following year, when we took my father’s pudding out of our freezer, we found that there had been so much alcohol in it that it hadn’t even frozen!

Last year, I made my first attempt at making Christmas pudding from scratch. (Those store bought ones don’t taste nearly as good as homemade ones!) I borrowed my maternal grandmother’s recipe collection, and found about 6 or 7 different Christmas pudding recipes. After much debate, I decided on making King George’s Christmas Pudding, as it seemed to be the most similar to what my paternal grandmother would make. I think I made the right choice – my dad quite enjoyed it, and will be eating the frozen one this year on Christmas day!

King George’s Christmas Pudding

Ingredients:
6 Tbsp. all-purpose flour
1 tsp ground allspice
1 tsp ground cinnamon
1/2 tsp ground nutmet
3/4 cup mixed candied peel
1 cup chopped blanched almonds
1 Tbsp. molasses
1 cup fine dry breadcrumbs
1 cup melted margarine
3/4 cup brown sugar
1 medium apple, peeled and grated
1 small carrots
1 1/2 cups golden raisins
3/4 cup sultana raisins
3/4 cup currants
grated rind and juice of one large lemon
2 medium eggs, beaten
1/3 cup stout or beer
1/3 cup brandy

Thoroughly combine all ingredients. Stir well, cover and leave mixture 24 hours to mature.

Press into greased two-quart bowl or mould and cover tightly with wax paper and foil.

Steam for six to eight hours. Remove covers and cool. Remove pudding from bowl and let dry. Wrap tightly in foil or plastic and store in cool dry place. To reheat, unwrap and place in bowl; cover and steam two hours.

Notes: If cutting in half (or if making two smaller puddings), you only need to steam for 3-4 hours.

As Christmas pudding wasn’t always something that us kids would enjoy, my grandmother also always made English Sherry Trifle. This is still one of my favourite desserts – partially because I only eat it at Christmas time (and so is extra special!) and partially because it is just SO PRETTY. Sadly, I don’t have any amusing anecdotes about this one. I have taken over making it for my immediate family, and have been doing so for the past five or six years. This year I will need to figure out substitutions for a few ingredients, since I can no longer eat gluten, which is a little frustrating, but I am determined to not let that deter me from having my favourite Christmas dessert on Christmas day!

English Sherry Trifle

Ingredients:
jelly rolls
1/2 cup sherry
2 pints raspberries
1 pkg raspberry Jello
Custard (we use 1 package of Bird’s instant custard!)
3 Tbsp. sugar
1 cup whipping cream
sprinkles

Cube jelly rolls; arrange in glass bowl, lining sides and bottom. Pour sherry over jelly rolls. Layer raspberries over top. Dissolve Jello in 1/2 cup boiling water and let it cool; pour over raspberries and cake. Cover and refrigerate until chilled and set. Meanwhile, make custard. Spoon cooled custard over set Jello. Meanwhile, whip cream and sugar. Spoon over custard. Top with sprinkles.

So, those are our traditional Christmas desserts that we’ve been eating for as long back as I can remember.

I hope you all have a wonderful holiday season, and that you too get good noms on Christmas (or whatever holiday you celebrate)!

And so now it’s time for me to do my yearly “hey! If you want to receive a Christmas card from me this year, fill out the form below!” post. (Form brought to us by Google docs, which keeps me crazy organized.) So yes, if you want a card, fill out the form below. If you want to send me a card too, I’ll send you my address shortly.

And if you want to send cards to anyone but don’t have any cards to use, I totally sell cards in my Etsy store. ;)

Yay fun!

One of my favourite Christmas traditions is holiday baking. YUM. Growing up, we would have plates and plates of different types of cookies, cakes, bars and other goodies laid out on the table for noms. And now, while my mom keeps cutting back, I keep baking more and more and bringing them all home with me when I visit my parents at Christmas time.

One of the things I like to do with the stuff I bake at Christmas is give them to friends/family for gifts. I find that it’s a lot more personal than buying something that you don’t know whether the person would like – plus, who doesn’t like homemade baked yummy desserts and snacks and stuff?? (Well, who other than perhaps my boyfriend, who doesn’t seem to like sweets for some crazy reason.)

Anyway! I wanted to share some of the things that I have found over the past few years are the best goodies for holiday gifts.

Chocolate Bark

Chocolate bark works awesome as a gift in either a small cellophane bag, or a cute little tin. I typically make either the Chocolate Marble Candy Cane Bark or the Winter Dried Fruit and Nut Chocolate Bark. Oh, and if you make this ahead of time, you can store it in a large ziplock bag in the freezer.

White Chocolate Popcorn

I originally stole this “recipe” (and I use that term loosely as you can swap most of the ingredients for stuff you like much much much better if you want) from a woman that my mother used to work with, and it is super-duper easy and even tastier. Into a large amount of plain popcorn, mix pretzels, peanuts, chex cereal and goldfish crackers. Would recommend either air-popping your own popcorn, or buying a large bag from Kernels. Melt a whole bunch of white chocolate wafers, and mix it into the popcorn mixture. And voila! Instant YUM. (You may not want to actually give this away, so make extra for yourself.)

Gumdrop Cake

This is my all-time favourite thing to make and give, and I’ve been making it for over a decade now. It’s like a light coloured fruit cake, only with gumdrops instead of fruit, and is a lot sweeter than fruitcake. The recipe says it makes one large cake, but! You know those really tiny foil loaf pans that you can get at the grocery store? The really tiny ones? Well, it makes enough batter to fill four to five of those – perfect for gifts! And here’s the recipe:

Ingredients:
1 lb light-coloured raisins
1 lb baking gumdrops, (not black)
1 cup butter
1 cup white sugar
1 tsp vanilla
2 eggs
2 cups sweetened applesauce
3 cups all-purpose flour
3 tsp baking powder
½ tsp salt
1 tsp cinnamon

Directions:
Boil raisins in water for 5 minutes. Drain & cool. In large bowl, cream butter and sugar. Beat eggs and add to butter/sugar mixture with vanilla and applesauce. Coat raisins and gumdrops with 1 cup of flour. Sift together remaining flour, salt and baking powder and cinnamon, then add to butter/sugar/applesauce mixture. Fold in raisins and gumdrops. Bake in large greased loaf pan / bundt pan at 300F for 2 – 2.5 hours.

ETA: OH! I forgot to mention! If you’re making 4-5 smaller ones, cooking time decreases by about half, so make sure to check often to make sure it doesn’t burn!

This year…

This year, I’m trying real home-made vanilla extract for a couple people, and Christmas pudding for a couple other people… haven’t tried either of them before, but if they turn out well, maybe I will be sharing them next year. :)

Anyway, thanks for stopping by for the Virtual Advent Tour – hope you all have a wonderfully happy holiday season!!

And one of my favourite ways to celebrate is by sending out Christmas cards! I know last year I asked for addresses, but didn’t send cards – I had just moved into a new apartment last November and sadly, did not have time to send out cards. This year, however, is going to be different! I have my cards almost completely designed, and will get them off to the printer next week.

And so, I ask, that if you want to receive a card from me, or if you want to do a card exchange, that you fill out the form below with your address and such.

Thank you!!!

I grew up on the Muppets. I watched The Muppet Show regularly with my dad, and I still love love love anything that has to do with the Muppets. So of course anything relating to both the Muppets and Christmas (my favourite time of the year) is going to be super duper awesomely awesome. Obviously.

My all-time favourite Christmas album is one that the Muppets do with John Denver – A Christmas Together. We had it on vinyl while I was growing up, and my first Christmas on my own I had to buy a digital copy of it from iTunes. This is still the first album I listen to every year, and has my favourite versions of Christmas songs on it: When the River Meets the Sea, The Peace Carol and Little Saint Nick (there’s something about Animal being Animal in everything that makes it pure gold!). I also cannot listen to The 12 Days of Christmas without wanting to throw in a loud “ba dum bum bum” after the “five golden rings” line every time I hear it thanks to this album.

My other Muppets-related tradition for every Christmas is pulling out my VHS of A Muppet Family Christmas. I have to watch this movie at least once a year at Christmas time, because it has the best of The Muppet Show, Sesame Street AND Fraggle Rock. (And anyone who doesn’t know what Fraggle Rock is has no idea what on earth they are missing out on. Kids shows just aren’t as fun any more as they were back in the day.)

Typically, I’ll put this movie on while doing my Christmas wrapping, and I always pause what I’m doing when the songs come on so I can sing along. Because no one does Christmas music better than the Muppets. Take, for instance, the song below, which isn’t really a Christmas song but since the Fraggles don’t typically celebrate Christmas you can really excuse that fact. This takes place when Kermit and Robin find a Fraggle hole in Fozzy Bear’s mother’s home and they stumble upon the Fraggles for the first time. The Fraggles share their holiday tradition with Kermit and Robin – every year someone is given a small Fraggle pebble. And that pebble must be passed on to someone else the following year.

So yes, Christmas wouldn’t be Christmas without A Christmas Together and A Muppet Family Christmas, and that is the Christmas tradition I decided to share with you all.

I hope you all have a happy holiday season and a wonderful new year!

Check out the other bloggers for today’s Virtual Advent Tour:

Beth @ Beth Fish Reads
Shauna @ Treasure Seekers
Brenda @ Joyful Holidays
Molly @ My Cozy Book Nook

For the book blogger Holiday Swap, Alice sent me Melissa Marr’s Ink Exchange. Thank you soooooo much for it; I’ve been wanting to read it for about two years now! I know I’m totally going to love it and am thoroughly looking forward to it! :)

I sent out my gift for the holiday swap a couple of weeks ago, and I really hope it gets to that person soon.

I hope you all have a very happy holiday season! :)

So!

If you want a Christmas card this year, please let me know. As I obviously don’t want you to randomly leave your address here, you have a couple of options for ways to do this. You can leave a comment on my LiveJournal (where this is cross-posted) (all comments there will be screened for this entry), dm me on Twitter, message me on Facebook, or send me an email (either here or here).

Yay Christmas!

Debi was my Santa for the Blogger Christmas exchange. Unfortunately, it appears that my package got lost in the mail – a tragedy because I hear that it had 3 fancy chocolate bars in it, and I am nothing if not addicted to chocolate. (No joke.) We fear it was those chocolate bars that resulted in it not being delivered – I am of the theory that those at customs saw the chocolate and decided they wanted it for themselves. ;)

Due to this fact, Debi was so super sweet and got me an Amazon gift card to replace the gift I never got. So, I am now eagerly awaiting Jim Butcher’s Storm Front: The Dresden Files Book 1, which I will be reading for the What’s In A Name? Challenge, as well as Alan Bennett’s The History Boys: A Play. Thanks again, Debi! And thanks to Nymeth for hosting the exchange!