A Hard Days Work!

This morning, we got up (a little late, oops) and Papa Bee took Louie to nursery as I braved the supermarket. We have been planning for a long time now to make a lot of our Christmas gifts for our family and friends. It has been a carefully thought out plan, which came together when nursery said that Mr Bee had to go in as we had used up all of our holiday already. So as I had the day off work, I actually had a day to get things done!

The dishwasher took forever sterilising the jars (it barely ever gets used) so whilst we were waiting, I got cracking making the truffle mixture. Silly me forgot that they need to set overnight but not to worry, I should have some time in the morning to get them done.

With the dishwasher still going, I decided to get going with the sugar cookies. They were such a hit last year with the family, that I had to make some more this Christmas.

After a quick trip out to Lakeland to get some posh little boxes to give our friends gifts in, we got started on the chutneys. 

I used the Kirstie Allsop Boxing Day Chutney recipe (found here) but with some alterations (as usual in my kitchen!) and it was a little bit trial and error but it smelt delicious and I think it is so far so good!

Then we began making the Tomato Relish, again from a recipe that I loosely based on. It turned in to a tomato and red pepper chutney that is absolutely divine, and SO easy to make.

Cooling outside

 Whilst the relish was simmering, I got on with icing my cookies. I was going to make royal icing but forgot to check our egg situation and we didn't have enough, so I mixed the icing up as thick as I could get away with and had a go. I am really not the best at icing, it just runs away! But I had a go :)

As Mr Bee and Papa Bee were playing upstairs before bed, I got all the jars labelled up, and some ribbon around the important jars! And as you can see, they must be good, as half a jar of relish is gone already! We had it with our hand made burgers (courtesy of Papa Bee) for our dinner!