mutteringhousewife

December 25, 2012

Cinnamon Scrolls

Of course I brought too much dessert to Christmas, but that’s much better than not bringing enough, surely? Some of everything went, it’s nice to have a choice. The most popular were the cinnamon scrolls and my Christmas present to you, dear reader, is to share the recipe.

I’m not entirely sure who gave me this recipe, it was in the days before taste.com, but I suspect it may have been our Washington correspondent, Kathleen Brady. Way back before my dear husband was able to grow hair in his chest he spent six months working in the US, an experience that marked him in many ways, the most permanent of which is an annoying assumption that all shops are always open, like they are in the US. He struck up an acquaintance with a girl on a beach there, and she turned out to be quite terrific, I spent two weeks sponging off her in her home about eighteen years ago, and even though it’s very hard to see her when we don’t really spend a lot of time over there and she’s only come over here in the distant past, we manage to keep in touch. I believe it was she that gave me a handwritten recipe for TJ’s Cinnamon Rolls to which dear husband had become much attached during his US sojourn. It’s a little involved, I only make it for special occasions. Here it is.

If you’re planning to take these to Christmas lunch, or serve them for morning tea, start the night before. Place in a bowl twenty grams of fresh yeast with half a cup of water. Squash it about with a fork until the yeast is dissolved. Mix in three cups of flour, a teaspoon of salt, one third of a cup of sugar, one cup of milk, one third of a cup of vegetable oil and two eggs. This will be quite a wet mixture. Gradually add in a further cup and a half of flour. You should now be able to turn it out onto your floured bench top and start kneading it. Knead in more flour until you have a soft, smooth dough. Bung it back into the bowl, cover it with a damp tea towel and stick it in the fridge overnight.

Next morning, remove it from the fridge where it has hopefully doubled in sized in the night. I hope you didn’t bother cleaning down the bench top, because you’ll be dumping it back onto the floured bench top and rolling it out into a very long rectangle, thus:

Place in another bowl 125 grams of butter, a cup of brown sugar and three teaspoons of cinnamon. Mix it until it’s combined. You can continue mixing it until it goes creamy if you want it to be more spreadable, but it really doesn’t matter. Scrape it onto the rectangle, making sure it’s evenly distributed along the long axis. And here’s a picture.

Roll it up so that you have one really long sausage. Have a couple of pans handy lined with baking paper. Start slicing off rolls about seven centimetres wide, but you can use your own judgement for this. Place them in the lined pans, not too close together.

Leave these until they’ve expanded so that they’re all squished together. I had to put them in the oven with just the light on for this, it was unseasonably chill this morning. Bake at one hundred and eighty degrees for about twenty five minutes, or until brown on top.

There’s an addendum to the recipe for a drizzled white icing to go over the top, but I feel that it’s excessive and have never made it. These are best warm, you can see in the above picture that some escaped shortly after leaving the oven. They’re good for about two days, then they go a bit hard and challenging. This is a big recipe, I often halve it.

It just occurs to me that I haven’t actually had any today. Too late now. If I have any more to eat I’ll slip into a coma, and then the kids will be playing Lego Lord of the Rings on the Wii all night and nobody will feed the dogs. Perhaps a carrot stick and a glass of water for dinner. They’ll still be there tomorrow if I get up early enough.

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December 24, 2012

Entertaining

No, really, I do like entertaining. I know I have tendencies towards the antisocial (No! I hear you cry in shocked amazement), but I really like having friends over for a meal. I like planning what to feed them, I like them to bring kids over to play with mine and have them all end up in the pool, I like to compare notes on other ways of being mums and dads, wives and husbands, breadwinners.

Because it’s a joint effort, there’s a point in the entertainment where my dear husband has to put meat over a flame. Unfortunately our elderly barbecue caught fire a few weeks ago, and there was nothing we could do except push it into the middle of the verandah and wait for the conflagration to die down, then put the corpse out in the cleanup. That meant that some ingenuity was required to satisfy the primitive in my life’s companion while entertaining English friends today. We dug out the old Weber from under the house, filled it with bits of old fence and put the rack from my precious new oven over the glowing coals that resulted (who knows where the original grill got to). It actually did a reasonable job. We quite liked the idea of cooking on an old fashioned style barbecue, one that wasn’t plugged in to anything. We didn’t cook anything fancy, my man likes his meat straight. He will occasionally condescend to barbecue a prawn, but there was no way I was going near any fishmonger this time of the year.

A jolly afternoon was had by all, and after the debris was cleared away, I realized that if I was going to be providing dessert for our large family Christmas, I may want to add one or two things to the baked goods already prepared. So tonight I’ve done a pan of brownies (I’m pretty sure you’ll find that one on the blog), a custard tart that looks like it may have actually worked!! and am about to begin the first step of what I traditionally bring to Christmas – cinnamon rolls. I’m pretty sure cinnamon rolls will be blogged about tomorrow if I get a moment to steal away from the hordes of children.

So that’s how I spent Christmas Eve, doing two of my favourite things. Sharing a meal with friends and baking for the the people I love. That’s uncharacteristically sentimental of me, is it not? Although if anyone else pops up claiming to be bearing the TRUE meaning of Christmas I shall go so far as to gnash a tooth or two. Looks like it’s time to take that tart out of the oven, I can’t believe I’ve finally made one where the custard hasn’t been eaten by the pastry! What I’m not going to be doing tonight is cleaning up my kitchen, that can wait until Boxing Day. This is what it currently looks like.

I have big plans for that pineapple. Something else to stay tuned for.

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December 21, 2012

Cheese and Olive Rusks

I’m over thinking it. Just because I’ll be bringing a plate tonight to some drinks with the mates doesn’t mean I have to bring anything fancy. There’s no expectation from those who read my blog that I’ll be bringing anything other than a box of Jatz. Good. Now that we’ve sorted that out, here’s a little something I’m whipping up in between shouting at the Horror and Muffet who likes to wear her cranky pants when she has friends over.

It’s along the same lines as biscotti, only with completely different ingredients. You can make it any flavour, really, you use a cup of assorted cheeses and three quarters of a cup of some other excitingly savoury ingredient. Like bacon. Or in this case, olives.

Beat together 125 grams of butter (yes, I’m using the salted Pepe Saya again) with a cup of cheese. The recipe I’m using, from The Good Cookie, suggests half a cup of feta and half a cup of Parmesan. I’m using a cup of Pizza Cheese, which I think is Parmesan, cheddar and mozzarella. Beat in, one at a time, two large eggs. You can only really get large eggs these days, I don’t know what they’re doing to the chickens but they’re getting larger every year. Mix in a quarter of a cup of milk, one and three quarter cups of flour, one teaspoon of baking powder, some pepper and three quarters of a cup of finely chopped olives. I thought I had a jar of pitted black olives in the fridge, but what I actually had was a jar of olive pickling liquid with a teaspoon in it. Fortunately right down the back I found a jar of green olives stuffed with pimentos. They’ll do nicely.

Knead it all together until it’s well mixed, then separate it into two halves. Shape each half into a log and place it onto a baking sheet lined with baking paper. It will be a very sticky mixture at this point. Bake for about thirty five minutes or until they just start to brown. Remove from the oven and cool for a bit while you peel some potatoes for dinner and turn the television down. Slice the logs as thinly or as rustically as you’d like and place the slices back on the baking sheet. You might need another one. Bake for a further twenty minutes or so with the oven at around 150 degrees or until they are looking dry and a bit coloured around the edges.

This recipe makes quite a lot of little tasty rusks, so it should carry me through a few Bring a Plate sessions. I’ve made them before, and I’m really looking forward to nibbling some with some champagne. They smell delicious, or as the kids would say “Errr, we’re not having that for dinner, are we?”

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December 20, 2012

Golden Lemon Tarts

There are many motivations for baking. You’re hungry, the kids are hungry, you’ve found a new recipe, you want to use up some coconut, you want to try out an exciting new butter. I wanted to make this recipe because of the little introduction printed above it.

I have two Pillsbury cookbooks from the late fifties, given to me by my Nanna when she couldn’t be bothered baking any more. I’ve flicked through them partly for amusement value, goodness those American housewives served up some odd stuff! But they certainly loved trying new things and using lots of flavours in their baking. The cookbook I’m referring to today is a thousand recipes from the Pillsbury Best of the Bakeoff collection, with coloured photos on the inside of the covers of hundreds of jolly housewives in aprons baking at rows of stoves while men in suits walk up and down tasting their food. I’m guessing that this was one of the Bakeoffs in question. Most recipes in this book have cute little descriptions between the heading and the baking instructions. Like “Here is a refreshing pie . . . the filling boasts fresh lime juice and crushed pineapple and calls for no cooking at all!”. Or “Plenty o’ apricots between crumb base and topping. Yummy with whipped cream”. Here’s the descriptor for the recipe that caught my eye.

How could I not make it. Of course, I also wanted to give the Pepe Saya butter a go in pastry. I should point out that it isn’t strictly a fair experiment, usually when I make pastry I’m fairly slapdash about it, with results that are invariably disappointing. Today I made the Lattice Pastry as directed, and now I don’t know if it was because I was being obedient or if it was the butter, but it is hands down the best pastry I’ve ever made.

Sift one and half cups of flour into a bowl with half a teaspoon of salt. Actually, I didn’t do that, I just dumped it in. Cut in half a cup of shortening (in the olden days they might used suet, but I went with 125 grams of Pepe Saya unsalted butter). You should use a pastry cutter for this, or extremely long fingernails. The idea is to not warm up the butter. I took a deep sigh and cut it in with a knife, a fairly time consuming job. Next time I’m up at the shops I’m getting a pastry cutter. When the average size of the butter bits is close to that of a pea, start sprinkling over tablespoons of cold water while tossing the flour with a fork. It was suggested that five would be sufficient, but I used six. Gather it together in a ball of crumbly dough and plonk it on your flour covered bench top. Flatten it down with your hands, then roll with a rolling pin until it’s about half a centimetre thick. Mine always crumbles around the edge, it’s never a nice circle like in the illustrations. Am I doing something wrong, or are they just cheating? I found that rolling into the centre makes in less crumbly. I’m going to put this lot into those little fluted tart tins with removable bottoms, so I pick a circle cutter with a slightly larger diameter than the tins. Cut out circles of pastry and very gently press them into the tins. Squash up remaining dough and reroll until you fill all of your tins. If you have the patience, you should blind bake these for ten minutes at 220 degrees, then uncovered for another five. I didn’t, so mine are a bit puffy.

You’re now going to fill these with lemon curd. You can buy quite nice lemon curd, but I’m sure you’d like to know how the Scottish lady in the concentration camp did it.

In the top of a double boiler place eighty grams of butter, one cup of caster sugar (actually, next time I’m going with three quarters of a cup, it was a bit sweet), the grated zest of a lemon, one third of a cup of lemon juice and a pinch of salt. Wait until the butter has melted, then gradually stir in four egg yolks. Continue stirring fairly continuously, only pausing to take phone calls pertaining to your daughter’s social life, for about ten minutes. The curd will still be fairly runny, but form slow moving drips when you hold up your whisk instead of falling straight off. Here’s my double boiler setup.

I’d wait a bit for the curd to cool down and thicken up before ladling it into the tart cases. I probably wouldn’t serve them with whipped cream, as suggested, but possibly a quenelle of King Island double cream would complement it nicely.

Or not.

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December 19, 2012

Fake Fajitas

The evenings are long and balmy and the family want to eat dinner on the back verandah. Their appetites are very variable at the moment, what with different levels of activity and various growth spurts going on. All we’ll need is a grab it yourself dinner and about fifteen mozzie coils, the anopheles are particularly frisky this year.

Our fajitas are more a homage to Mexican than the real thing. We had the real thing when we went to San Diego a couple of years ago, the kids still speak longingly of Nortes, next to our hotel, where we ate all manner of combinations of meat and corn by the outside fire. The Muffet loved tortillas at Nortes, but hates them here, I have to admit they’re a flabby imitation of the real thing and I’m not quite up to making them myself. We use Lebanese bread.

Set out a plate of Lebanese bread, a bowl of grated cheese, various bits of cut up salad, we use avocado, capsicum, lettuce, carrot and cucumber. Also wedges of lime, possibly some sour cream, a bowl of salsa and one of refried beans, which I’ll get to in a minute. At the last minute, bring out a plate of stir fried beef. You may want to bring it in a heated bowl, it goes cold quickly. You assemble the ingredients of your choice on the bread, wrap it up and eat it, then argue about who’s going to get the last bit of lettuce.

You can buy the salsa and beans anywhere you like, but I find it a little bland and unsatisfying and, in the case of the beans, slightly revolting. You guessed it, you can make your own! The salsa is particularly easy, particularly when Frank has in stock locally grown Roma tomatoes. A month ago you couldn’t get tomatoes anywhere, now you can get a bucketload for what you can find in the bottom of your handbag. You should make this about lunchtime, or the day before, the flavours develop. Cut up three tomatoes and deseed them, which is slightly annoying, but results in a lot less wet salsa. Resist the urge to add olive oil, bocconcini, basil, olives and balsamic vinegar, there’s something in the air in this suburb. And half a clove of finely minced garlic, the juice of half a lime, and one plantful of chopped up coriander. I also put in a teaspoon of sambal oelek and a couple of grinds of salt, taste it as you go. I don’t think I’ll stick in the fridge, it’s hard enough putting together a warm fajita.

The refried beans are pretty simple too, but not even fried once, which confuses me. The onion is, fry a finely chopped onion in a little olive oil over low heat until it’s soft. Add two cloves of finely minced garlic, one teaspoon of ground coriander and three of cumin. Stir it around for a few seconds, then dump in a can of red kidney beans. Most recipes suggest about a third of a cup of water should be added here, but one goes with beer, so that’s what I add. Continue cooking it over low heat for about ten minutes, then start mashing it with a potato masher. It will thicken up considerably when it cools, so don’t reduce it too much. Add salt to taste, don’t go overboard. You can make this ahead of time too, either heat it back up in the frying pan or zap it in the microwave.

Of course the kids are not going to have the salsa, beans or avocado, but that’s more for us. I should have got some tequila while I was out, I’m seriously going to start wearing a foil hat while shopping to prevent my brain being erased all the time.

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December 18, 2012

Shortbread with Pepe Saya butter

If I’m going to the trouble of making something from scratch then, as you may have gathered by now, I like to use the best ingredients I can reasonably lay my hands on. I’ve been fairly happily using Harmonie butter in my baking for some time now, but the distance that little yellow block of joy has to travel to end up taking pride of place in my fruitcake bothers me. I want to buy local. I do occasionally see dairy stalls at markets when I manage to escape my family for half an hour, but if you think I’m the type that can wander up and ask for a sample then you are very very wide of the mark. So I’ve been taking recommendations. And what I keep hearing is Pepe Saya.

The first thing is locating it. Go to the factory in Tempe, advises my hairdresser. Ah, but the school holidays have started and I’m trying to minimise time in the car with my darling children, especially the Horror who still lacks an inside voice. The website is very spartan and I’m tempted to send them a list of improvements, for example a list of vendors of their product. Or opening hours for their shopfront. Or if they have a shopfront. As it turns out, Harris Farm carries it and I’ve been walking past it for ages because, for reasons best known to themselves, they package it like it’s a cheese. Round, in a shiny foil like substance, and they also have a picture on it of someone looking down their nose which I also find to be a questionable marketing technique.

OK, I’ve got some, and I’ve prevented the Muffet from getting a surprise when she wanted a wedge of it on a cracker. I want a recipe that showcases the butter, and what can be simpler than shortbread? I don’t need the internet for this one, I have plenty of shortbread recipes in my less loony cookbooks and I’m going for the classic Women’s Weekly one. Although I am tempted by the one in the Good Cookie that involves infusing the butter with tea leaves. Hmm. I’ll bet that’d also work with lavender. Another time.

Unwrap the butter and load 185 grams of it into a bowl. I don’t usually use cultured butter, basically because it’s not what I’m used to. It’s a much more complex flavour, with slightly yoghurty overtones that I’m a bit concerned about for my recipe. Sift in two cups of plain flour, a quarter of a cup of icing sugar and a tablespoon of ground rice. I ground the rice in my extremely handy coffee grinder that has been getting a hell of a workout since I killed my stick mixer. I’m also adding a half a teaspoon of vanilla for a bit of fragrance. Knead it all together, then dump it onto a floured work bench. I don’t get it to form a smooth ball, but I roll it out anyway. This is one that looks lovely with fancy cutter shapes because it doesn’t spread out. I’m almost tempted to use my set of heart shapes, but in the end I use a four leaf clover shape. I want the boys to eat them too. You can place them very close on your baking sheet because of the lack of spreading out.

I baked mine at 180 degrees for about twenty minutes, and you can see from the photo that this was too high a temperature. I have a fan forced oven, so next time I’ll go with 160 degrees and will keep an eye on them. You don’t really want them to brown. My fears about the tang were completely unfounded, I’ve got a subtle flavoured, beautifully textured biscuit that will reward contemplation over a cup of tea. Pity I don’t drink tea. Also a pity that the dripping wet little boys that rushed past and inhaled a few didn’t bother contemplating the subtle flavours. They did say “YUMM!!”.

Lucky that worked out so well, because I bought quite a lot of the butter. Christmas baking coming up, after all.

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December 17, 2012

Homemade Iceblocks

I actually went Christmas shopping, with kids, on the weekend. Fortunately the residents of inner Sydney are late risers, and we were there before it got to the point where you have to strip yourself naked and cover yourself with chicken grease to squeeze through the crowds. We were successful in our purchases and were heading gratefully to the car when we passed a homewares shop. It contained ice cream moulds, something I’d been meaning to add to my collection of kitchen gadgets ever since I first made sorbet weeks and weeks ago. I avoided the ones shaped like adorable bugs and went for the ones in eight packs, mainly because they use disposable sticks. My memory of homemade iceblocks, apart from them not being very interesting due to consisting of home brand lemonade, is tarnished by the thought of the plastic sticks covered in the teeth marks of multiple mouths.

So far I have made Strawberry and Watermelon and Apple Cinnamon iceblocks. Truth be told, all you really need to do is whiz the fruit up in a blender, stick it the moulds and Bob is your uncle, or in my case, great uncle. But when do I ever pass up a chance to get fancy?

For the Strawberry and Watermelon, I blended up a punnet of strawberries, an equivalent volume of watermelon, the juice of a quarter of a lemon, eighty grams each of icing sugar and condensed milk. It made eight iceblocks. A tip that you may wish to take on board is that it’s a little trying getting them out of the mould. The instructions suggest a gentle squeeze of the plastic is all that’s necessary, but that’s absurdly optimistic. More like thirty seconds dunked in hot water. So what I’ve done is to wait until they’re frozen, unmould them, stick them in a ziplock bag and back in the freezer. Then it’s easy for the kids to get at and the moulds are free for your next batch. Here’s what the Strawberry and Watermelon pops looked like

They were utterly delicious and surprisingly creamy. They also melt quite fast, which makes me wonder what commercial iceblocks must have in them. Fortunately the volume is small, so none of it was wasted dripping down arms. I even went to the trouble of working out a cost per unit, just for kicks. Two dollars for the strawberries, about sixty cents for the watermelon, sixty cents of condensed milk and let’s say forty cents for a quarter of a lemon and the icing sugar. That’s forty five cents each for ingredients.

I will do some water ones based on my syrup recipes, but first I wanted to try a flavour that it only just occurs to me is vastly underrepresented in ice cream flavours. Apple. Why is banana icecream so prevalent, but not apple? I blame the Fabian society, the darlings of conspiracy theorists. Take four green apples, peel and quarter them and chop out the seeds. Place them in a small saucepan with a third of a cup of brown sugar. Cook, covered, over low heat for about ten minutes, stirring occasionally, until apples soften. Tip them into the blender. Add a teaspoon of cinnamon and eighty grams of condensed milk. Blend. I was rather annoyed that this only made seven iceblocks, I shall use larger apples next time. It also occurs to me that if I had some plain biscuits or shortbread I was trying to get rid of, I could break it up and mix it into the blended fruit and the result would be apple pie flavour. I have a feeling the kids won’t like this one, they’re not that fond of cooked apple. Of course this means more for me. I won’t know until after dinner, they take a bit over four hours to freeze. This is what the set looks like

What I need now is more paddle pop sticks. Pity someone wiped my brain while I was at the shops this morning. Bloody Fabians.

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December 14, 2012

Orange and Grapefruit Jelly

My dear ole grandma has many fantastic qualities, she’s eternally optimistic, she’s everyone’s friend, she has been a stalwart of her community wherever she’s lived. But goodness me, she can’t cook. I have vivid memories of, after spending half an hour trying to shred apart a dry grey piece of unidentifiable meat, being served a dessert of tinned apricots, a slice of custard and a slice of jelly. I still don’t know how she managed that, I’ve made jelly from a a packet and not had it turn into skin all the way through. She has never been able to explain it herself and long ago gave up making jelly. I wonder if she’d like what I made today? I’ll have to take her some next time I visit.

I have some nude citrus fruit lying around, as I often do, as a result of finding the peel more useful that the insides. In this case I had made a new batch of candied peel for my next lot of fruitcakes, leaving with a naked pink grapefruit and defrocked oranges. My helpful hairdresser suggested slicing them in half, applying a citrus juicer to them and drinking the results, but I always think that it’s a lot of effort to go to to be consumed in seconds. It was time to try something I’d been meaning to for ages, turning them into jelly.

Half the fun in trying something new is trawling the interwebs for recipes. You get such an insight into other cultures, particularly the ever fascinating Americans. They tend to use pectin for their jellies, and using fresh juice doesn’t seem to happen very often. I don’t know if they don’t have as much access to fresh fruit, but most recipes I saw involved the sweetened and the concentrated. However, it wasn’t nearly as complex as I’d always thought. I was pointed in the right direction by an article in The Guardian. What an article full of inspiration that was. The author claimed to have once made an entire Christmas dinner in jelly form. There’s a thing to make you go hmmm.

Get yourself a packet of gelatin leaves and try to shake off that uneasy feeling you get when something is measured in quantities so far from SI as leaves. Measure how much juice you have. One pink grapefruit and two oranges gave me a cup of juice. Tip it into a bowl with three cut up gelatin leaves. Go hang out the washing and deflea the dogs. Come back and put the bowl over a saucepan of simmering water. I went with my gut feeling and added two tablespoons of sugar, because things don’t taste as sweet when they’re cold. Leave it to heat up for about five minutes. Stir it occasionally to see how much the gelatin has dissolved. When it has completely dissolved, remove from heat and strain into another bowl, which you will place in the fridge and not poke for at least four hours.

It’s divine. I can’t believe how good it tastes. It’s a very soft jelly, you wouldn’t want to leave it out of the fridge for long. I don’t think I should tell the children about it. That’s started a whole new thing for me. First syrups, then sorbet, now jellies. What else have I been missing out on?

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December 13, 2012

Fruit Bread

Full house today. School holidays (private school) and a sunny day mean a pool full of kids. Nothing I bake is ever going to fill them up, but they can have fruit toast for afternoon tea.

Place in a bowl eight grams of fresh yeast and a cup and a half of warm water. Squish that yeast around with your fingers until it has all dissolved. Add a quarter of a cup of white sugar, three teaspoons of mixed spice, a pinch of salt and three cups of flour. Mix it until it’s a sticky dough. Turn it out onto a floured kitchen bench and work that extra flour in until it’s still a fairly soft dough and knead it until it’s smooth. Bung it back in the bowl with a damp tea towel over it and leave it somewhere warm for an hour or two. My current favourite place is in the oven with the light on.

You can leave it in the bowl as you work in a half a cup of currants and half a cup of sultanas. They’ll keep trying to escape, but force those little rascals back in. Line a loaf pan with baking paper and squash the fruit dough in. Put it back in the oven with the light on and leave it until the loaf has risen to at least the edges of the pan. Or until you’re so hungry you can’t leave it alone any more. Brush the top with a little milk and sprinkle liberally with cinnamon sugar. Turn the oven up to 220 degrees C and bake it for fifteen minutes. Turn the oven down to 180 degrees and bake for a further half an hour, or until it’s nice and brown and crispy on top and sounds a bit hollow when you knock on it to find out who’s home.

Even the Moose likes it. Fortunately the others haven’t found it yet, so I was able to photograph the remains.

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December 12, 2012

Christmas Earrings

I can see that there is a place in this world for battery operated earrings. Also earrings so cheaply made that they are actually designed to only last the couple of weeks until Christmas. But sometimes, you want something a little more classy to indicate that you’re not really Scrooge. Not all the time, anyway.

I’m putting these pictures up in a blatant attempt to sell some of them, or to give you some ideas if you’re an earring maker yourself. You’d think I’d go to the trouble of photographing them properly in this case, but I have a nasty cold and have to spend way too much time in the car ferrying around squabbling children rather than lying in bed while someone brings me mugs of ginger tea and applies cold compresses to my itching eyes to mess around with cameras and cables. You’ll just have to use your imagination.

These angels are a one off, because the Muffet pinched all my angel wings. If you’re friends with her, you’ll already have one. If you want this collector’s edition, it’s ten bucks.

Not strictly Christmas earrings, but whimsical enough for the season I rather think. These are also one offs (two offs?) as I haven’t any more teapot findings. I can remake them with different coloured tea, but if you want a rainbow of these you’ll have to wait until I do another order from the US. Fifteen dollars on base metal hooks.

Real pearl snowmen, with a Swarovski diamanté collar in silver or gold on sterling or goldfilled hooks. Twenty dollars. Aren’t they cute? Yes I realise that snowmen are inappropriate for an Australian Christmas, but don’t get me started.

I made a whole lot of these a couple of years ago and am a bit over them, so if you’d like them in a different colour you’ll have to bring me coffee as well as handing over twenty five dollars. They’re quite fiddly.

I’m very fond of this pattern. I made the black and gold ones to go with my necklace of last night, they have a tiny garnet centre which doesn’t show up in the photo. Both of these little stars are the same pattern, just with slightly different sized beads. I think these should also be twenty five dollars, just name your colours.

My Christmas earrings of choice. Fifty dollars, they take ages. These are night blue and gold and I’m making them in a whole lot of colours. They’re big, but they’re light and I love them the most. Definitely not just for Christmas time.

There are a couple of other patterns that I do involving dangling leaves in festive colours, but they may have to wait for another day. Now if you’ll excuse me, I need to put on dinner, bring in the washing, camouflage an oversized Christmas present, pick up the Moose from surfing and see if I can cough up a lung.

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