Hairy Bakers!
Well, okay so we aren’t going to rival The Boys for any time to come but we had a sudden urge to have a more hand made flavour to Christmas courtesy of The Hairy Baker’s Christmas special so I tracked down the recipes on the BBC site (no mean feat, they don’t link to them anywhere I can see, you have to search on "Hairy Bikers" to get their recipes then rummage through to get the Christmassy ones, getting distracted along the way by things like Cornish Pasties and Cider soup!) and wrote the shopping list. Which I promptly forgot when we set off shopping and had to go back for because forgetting anything off the list was going to be a disaster!
We started by setting the lemon to boil for an hour (for the mince pies) whilst we made the pudding. The scent of lemon pervaded the hosue and made me feel more chereful than I have in ages. Thankfully, Aprilia remembered the rather wonderful visual image of really dark soft brown sugar in the pudding and stopped me tipping plain old demerara into the bowl - it only says "brown sugar" on the recipe, well, it did, I’ve written a note on my copy so I know to use the darkest sugar in the cupboard! I’ve never made a pud before and I have to confess, I don’t think I will EVER buy one again, I mean, why would you when it’s dead easy to make and you can have the glorious aroma of it wafting through the house for 2 hours whilst it steams????? I’ve sampled it and it’s wonderful but I think next time I’d blitz the almonds much smaller so you get the flavour but not the texture as I think Aprilia will struggle with taht. Oh, and I’d make sure I had a pudding basin too so I didn’t have to use my only other mixing bowl! In fact I think I need to aquire a few small baisins so I can make such delights for parents for Christmas!
Then it was time for violin which seemed to go well. I’m not sure what, if any, progress is being made but she is enjoying being part of a gaggle of girlies making some sort of collective noise together. I need to buy a new string for my violin then I can have a bit of a play at home and hopefully inspire a bit of practicing between bi-weekly lessons! Whilst the girls fiddled, I chatted to Clare, another home ed mum. We spent the last lesson discussing dyslexia and how she was concerned about her elder daughter so I took Aprilia’s Stile books for her to look at. they were a hit (I think I should get commission on those books you know!) and I loaned her our set of coloured overlays to see if her dd is more comfortable reading through coloured tints having explained the difference it makes to Aprilia and I.
Then it was home for tea, bedtime stories and bed for Aprilia and a stern phone call from me to E-On about their proposal to up my energy bill by £15 a month. In fact I was so cross with them that I ended up looking on uSwitch which I’ve been threatening to do for ages but never get round to. The result is that by switching to npower I should save something like £120 over a year. Which is a lot really. But I wouldn’t have bothered looking if they hadn’t taken the piss on putting my dd up twice in one year, especially as energy prices are supposed to have come down over the past few months!
And now I’m going to be a good girl and log off and get an early night!
