Category Archives: All about me
‘Tis the season to get cooking
This year I wanted to put my mark on Christmas and make as many homemade things as I could think of with the able assistance of the little lady. I left out fudge and didn’t leave myself sufficient time to make a Christmas cake this year so I have something to post about next year!
My homemade Christmas started with chutney and where best to start the search for a recipe than Netmums
Chutney – this sweet chutney in my opinion was the perfect accompaniment to our first course pâté dish on Christmas Day. The husband did not agree as it contained raisins but more for the rest of us!
Gingerbread biscuits – I had intended to make reindeer Gingerbread biscuits as I had seen in a post on Wokingham Gossip Girls but I could not find a gingerbread man cutter (you turn a gingerbread man upside down for the desired effect) for love or money and so resorted to star and heart cutouts with decorative icing. We made the biscuits a couple of weeks in advance and froze them but had I known that they were quite so easy to make, I suspect they would have tasted better fresh.
Peppermint creams – again we made these in advance (no requirement for freezing, just to be left in a sealed bag) and given their simplicity, I would definitely only make them a day or two early in future.
Christmas cupcakes – these were made using a simple fairy cake recipe and the icing was simply buttercream mixed with red/green food colouring for that extra festive feel.
Pavlova & Trifle – I was determined that we, or more to the point I, was going to make a Christmas dessert or two from scratch so I turned to the most reliable source Delia Smith for my pavlova. The pavlova was absolutely scrumptious and surprisingly easy to make. The trifle looked good, however it completely lacked flavour so I have uploaded a piccie but have omitted the recipe for this one. I was quick to admit the blandness of the flavour so as to avoid any awkward and less than truthful exclamations of how ‘delicious’ it was!
If you have any festive recipes that I could try for next year, please feel free to post your recipe/link below!
‘I Did It Mummy’ fundraising for Babies in Buscot Support – https://www.justgiving.com/IDidItMummy
Christmas Sweet Trees
I’ve admired sweet trees from afar for a while and I was considering purchasing one for Christmas, until I discovered that they start from £20 so I thought why not have a go myself and these are the results…
Very simple to make – polystyrene from my husband’s latest electrical purchase, bamboo skewers, lashings of melted chocolate, a tube or three of Smarties, a tub of Cadbury’s Roses and some big own brand milk and white chocolate buttons. The Roses were affixed using my latest purchase, a glue gun!
‘I Did It Mummy’ fundraising for Babies in Buscot Support – https://www.justgiving.com/IDidItMummy
Counting down to Christmas
I was hoping to be writing today as one proud Mummy beaming at her daughter’s first ballet show but a vomiting and diarrhoea bug put paid to that so instead we move onto the festive season.
For me December 1st marks the start of this, where we clamber in the loft for the Christmas box and deck the halls (can it really be a year since we last did this?). I usually make the unspoken promise to myself that no Christmas songs will come out of my mouth until this day but as we were driving along with ‘Do they know it’s Christmas time’ blaring out of the radio last weekend, my lips felt a distinct tingle and I couldn’t help the notes that bellowed out (those that know me, know I can’t sing).
Anyway I digress. I had intended to avoid buying chocolate advent calendars for the children this year, as we do have a fabric Father Christmas stocking come advent calendar, where we could put our own treats in each pocket. When Andy pointed out that doing this times two would cost more than two chocolate advent calendars, particularly from Poundland, I bowed into pressure and made what I considered at the time a necessary purchase. If only today’s post on Wokingham Gossip Girls had come a week earlier. One of the gals was asking for suggestions for a note for each day with Christmassy things to do for the children. One lady said that there are some great ideas on Pinterest which I have recently started using (I fear another time suck), so inspired, I logged in and have come up with the following notes that the children will hopefully enjoy ‘reading’ (neither can read yet at Age 4 & 1). Perhaps this will become a new Popple Christmas tradition.
‘I Did It Mummy’ fundraising for BIBS – https://www.justgiving.com/IDidItMummy
136 sellers, 445 shoppers and £4.5k raised for the NCT
Back in July when I jointly agreed to run the NCT Wokingham Nearly New Sale with a good friend, I had no idea quite what I had let myself in for. My good friend had offered to co-run the sale prior to going back to work but a high profile promotion later and I was pretty much flying solo. This was going to be a baptism of fire.
So I set about doing what I do best, getting organised and getting the job done. I started by contacting a veteran of NCT Nearly New Sales who had organised four previous sales and met with her to get down to the nitty gritty. It’s fair to say by the end of this meeting, I was pretty overwhelmed with the sheer enormity of the task ahead. I’m a natural born worrywart and the only way I can curb my anxiety is to pro-actively do something about whatever is concerning me. This meant taking control so I armed myself with my master document, detailing all the tasks that needed doing, by whom and when. If it wasn’t on the list, then it wasn’t getting done.
When people ask what I do, I usually say that I don’t work at the moment and am a Stay-at-home-Mum who dabbles in various things, the NCT, being one of those things. If organising an NCT Nearly New Sale isn’t work, then I don’t know what is, albeit it is voluntary work, i.e. no pay cheque at the end of the day!
Heading up a team of volunteers is a very different challenge to heading up a project team at work. At work, there are roles and responsibilities which come with accountability. At work you can hold weekly face-to-face meetings , check on progress, set expectations and delegate. In the volunteer sector, there is no such thing as delegation, you can ask for help and pray that the job gets done.
I was fortunate that there was already a core team in place – I certainly couldn’t have done this without our Volunteers Coordinator, Seller Registration Coordinator, Till Coordinator, Treasurer, PR Coordinator, Café Coordinator, ‘Costco’ Coordinator (who got all our supplies!), not to mention the 40 plus volunteers who helped out on the day and 3 husbands (including mine) who were in charge of parking and queue management. To top it off, we had a great site manager who made sure that all our needs were met and my good friend was invaluable on the weekend of the sale, helping to set up and cart equipment about.
So the results are now in (drum roll please…) and the sale was an overwhelming success – 136 sellers, 445 shoppers and £4.5k raised for the NCT and I made £80 as a seller – not bad for a first time NCT Nearly New Sale Coordinator!
‘I Did It Mummy’ fundraising for BIBS – https://www.justgiving.com/IDidItMummy
I Did It Mummy 