It's beginning to look a lot like Christmas

It's that wonderful time of the year...



This is what it looks like when 31 children in your class each give you a card!

2011 Christmas Card

Our Christmas Card for 2011 (once again, from Vistaprint)






See other pretty Christmas cards at Faith's blog

Christmas Fruit Cake Balls

Every Christmas for the past few years, my Mum makes these Christmas Cake balls (I help!) We got the recipe from my godson's mum.


The recipe is as follows:
800g fruit cake
250g block milk or white chocolate
125g butter
2-3 tablespooms of Irish whiskey (or you can substitute with another liqueur such as rum, brandy, Kahlua, Frangelico etc or use vanilla essence or orange juice)


Melt half the block of chocolate and the butter in a bowl over a saucepan of boiling water.

Crumble the fruit cake in and add the liqueur and mix it in.

Spread greaseproof paper on baking trays and using a teaspoon amount of the mixture, roll it into balls and then put them in the fridge for a few hours to set until they become hard.

Then melt the rest of the chocolate in a bowl as before and spread a teaspoon's amount over the top of each cake ball until it is completely covered.

Makes 40.



Usually my mum & I make them using Kahlua and 125g milk chocolate (for the mixture) and 125g white chocolate (for the icing). We also add a quarter of a red glace cherry to each one, so it looks like a mini Christmas pudding!

Don't they look cute?

Our Christmas

The lead-up and the preparation...










Christmas Day was spent like this:

Haha!

After we unwrapped presents (and put all the wrapping paper in the bin!) we headed over to the house of a family friend, part of a big group of friends that we always spend Christmas Day with.

They have a pool in their backyard, and the weather was beautiful, so this is how we spent most of the day:














Chelsea, who's 6, made each of us our own Christmas bonbons, and this was my paper hat- check out the illustrations of Santa and his reindeer!





After a yummy lunch of prawns, followed by lamb, ham, pork, chicken and all the trimmings, we started our annual games.

Every year we play a whole heap of games outside (we have a score sheet and a trophy for the winner and everything!)

And then it was time for my favourite part of the day- the dessert!

I always make this Toblerone cheesecake for Christmas

There was yummy cream filled chocolate cake,

and this year someone brought a new addition for the dessert table - chocolate torte! Yum!

After all those hours spent eating and then attempting to "work off the calories" in the pool (ha!)
I headed to Keisha's house to meet up with my friends.

Last year we started a new tradition of getting together on Christmas night after we'd spent the day with our families, and it is now one of my favourite things about Christmas Day.

Once we all arrived, we exchanged presents (and all I can say is that my friends know me VERY well) and launched into an extremely competitive game of Taboo, followed by a crazy-intense version of Junior Pictionary.






We played in pairs, and while Elise and I kicked butt at Taboo (literary legends that we are!), Laura and Keisha aptly named themselves "The A Team" because they beat us at Pictionary! What can I say, Elise and I are words people, Keish and Laur are pictures people!

Here are the champs celebrating their win:



Competitive freaks that they are haha ;) It was so much fun hanging out with the girls and playing board games, laughing and being silly in what is after all, the silly season!