I am sure that you have taken down all the Christmas decorations by now but I still have some holiday pictures to catch up with. Just one festive one and the rest are just things that we did around that time. How time passes quickly…Christmas has come and gone in the blink of an eye.

This a picture of a piece of black cake that we received from a friend. I don’t want to talk like I am any authority on black cake (because I am not) but it seems to me that the main ingredients are sugar (brown or white, plus or minus molasses), caramel colouring for the black colour, fruit, nuts and rum. Every household has their personal black cake recipe and every household has the best black cake recipe!! It is hard to compare because they can be so different…some people prepare their own fruits months ahead and some don’t even bother with fruit and nut. Essentially (I think) the most important thing is that it is black in colour. Anyway, this year we had the pleasure of a few of these as gifts…Thank-you to all!! A slice with a cup of tea is quite nice…this one has a drizzle of our Chocolate Velvet to make it even more sumptuous.

I think that I mentioned that we had Christmas ham and that we had a lot of left-overs. On Boxing day, we made dumpling sheets from our wonderful Chinese noodle maker:

We made ham and potato dumplings with the skins. It took us the whole morning but we managed to finish up all our left-overs.

We froze most of these so that we can have ‘fast food’ now and then. They are delicious deep-fried or steamed. We had them deep-fried for a treat on Boxing Day. It was a nice way to pass the day…just Munchkin and Gnome with the cats!

Oh yes…the cats…peace (for one day) on Christmas Day…they slept the entire day and night because it was sooooo cold!!