Christmas Musings from Leicester, UK

As December draws in Christmas and festive celebrations are becoming more of a focus for thoughts. Last year I managed to spend a week on the Costa del Sol in the week just prior to Christmas week. Unfortunately, I won't be able to do that this year.

I'm expecting my two daughters back from University around December 20th and want to make our celebrations really special this year. My middle girl only left home in September and I miss her incredibly. I'm sort of beginning to wonder how I'll manage in a couple of years when my son leaves home and I'm living alone. It's so strange facing up to the departure of the kids I've raised for the past 21 years and a little frightening really.....

For the first time in my life I've actually made traditional Christmas pudding and two Christmas cakes. The steamed Christmas pudding is shown above and now it just needs maturing for a few weeks. On Christmas Day I will douse it in brandy and set light to it and then serve it with brandy butter, cream or custard. I prefer cream but brandy or rum butter are the traditional accompaniments. At present I'm lavishly pouring brandy over the pudding and cakes on a weekly basis. Hopefully by the time we come to eat them they'll be super tasty. The Christmas pud looks really moist and smells delicious already and I've posted an image of it above. The Christmas cakes were slightly overdone. Unfortunately my oven temperature goes a little random and I didn't check them soon enough. I moved them lower in the oven and covered the tops with foil and they're not too bad. One is slightly more singed than the other but as I keep adding brandy it does look like it's getting more moist so hopefully I won't have to cut chunks off it before I put the icing on.

My mom is helping with a homeless shelter over the next few months. It's something the churches do in the UK on a regular basis. This is the first year her church has got involved and every Saturday she's going to be up there at 6am and preparing breakfasts. She's volunteered one of my Christmas cakes for the shelter so I hope I do manage to make a good job of the cakes as I want them to enjoy it.

Mom did invite our family over to her place for a restaurant meal on Christmas Day this year but I've turned the invite down because I really want to spend the time with the kids and prepare a traditional Xmas lunch and relax in my own home. At the moment I'm frantically decorating a bedroom for the girls and hope they'll be prepared to share a room over the holiday.

We'll have a family get together on Boxing Day at this house and I hope to use some of the cocktail recipes that I'm posting on my new website for some of the guests. It's difficult though, unless they stay over for the night it's just not worth drinking and driving and running risks of accidents or getting caught by the police. I suppose I can drink the cocktails if nobody else does though.....

For some reason my local city council have decorated our Town Hall Square with Wombles Christmas decoration tableau this year and there's a couple of images below of the lights in the Town Hall area of Leicester for 2013.