Monthly Archives: November 2012

Starstruck at Christmas

November 30, 2012 By in Making, Paper Paper! Tags: , , , , , , 26 Comments



Regular followers will know of my obsession with all things paper, and with projects which take very little time or specialist skill.  As Christmas draws ever closer, I’ve been experimenting with different types of festive stars and bring you some simple projects to try today.  My usual reassuring criteria apply; these had to be things I could a) get right the first time – or very occasionally the second; b) could do in front of the TV, merlot in hand, and c) look far more elegant and skilled than the actual labour would suggest.  I hope you’ll agree!



Below you’ll find my instructions on how to make each of these stars; the classic 5-point Amish barn stars, 6-point folding stars and concertina or snowflake stars, which look beautiful hung in windows.  Once you’ve got the hang of it, each of these are really simple to make and look beautiful when clustered together on a tree, or hung on a staircase  - or even just gathered in a large bowl on the table.



Five-point stars are in some ways the most striking and simple stars; reminiscent of Amish barn stars and New England folk decorations, they are the kind of stars that children draw in their first pictures.  They make beautiful garlands or tree decorations, and once you’ve made one you can knock up a whole galaxy very simply.

I love layering these stars once I’ve made them, and propping them on mantels and against walls. I’ll also be hanging them on bedroom doors this Christmas with monograms or name tags on, so that all our visitors can still find their room after an evening of eggnog and mulled wine.. Just overlay your stars and use glue dots or hot glue to secure them.  I added a Christmas bell and a pearl bead to these below;

They make gorgeous gift-toppers too….

Here’s my step-by-step guide to creating 5-point stars.  You can use any thickness of paper or lightweight card; paper is perfect for stars you want to thread into garlands or hang from the tree; card stock is best when you want to prop them up on their own ‘points’ – the greater thickness will give strength and avoid them bending or curling after a few days.  You’ll need a compass and a protractor.  I’ve marked my star in black pen for simplicity, but use a pencil to avoid it showing through.

Finally, fold!  If you’re working on the ‘wrong’ side – with your markings facing you like in the picture above – you want to fold the dotted lines towards you  (mountain folds), and the solid lines away from you (valley folds), so that when you flip it over your star looks like this finished one below.  The good news is that the stars are quite forgiving and can take a bit of refolding before they collapse.  Make one out of newspaper or a tax bill first, then use your prettiest paper when you’ve got the technique nailed.

If you’re making a garland or a set of same-sized tree decorations, I’d suggest that you draw your one star onto card stock and then use it as a template for all of the others by just tracing around it; very gratifying, and it means that you can throw your compass and protractor out of the window with glee.

You can find my original tutorial on how to make 6 point stars here, so I won’t repeat all the steps below; suffice to say I find these even quicker than the 5 point stars to make, and they look beautiful when strung together round a wreath frame, threaded by their points into a garland or hung in clusters like these on Harry’s playroom staircase.

If you are stringing them into a decorative garland (looks beautiful over a fireplace or along shelves), poke a needle threaded with invisible thread through two of the  tips of the stars as shown below.  If you thread them through the opposing, centre tips they’re more likely to spin in the air and you will spend a lot of time gazing at the backs… not ideal.

Again, if you’re mass-producing these, draw one out onto stiff card and use it as a template for all of the others; it’ll save you hours.

Which brings us finally to the easiest of all (and arguably the prettiest); concertina or snowflake stars.  I’ve made mine using 12″ square polkadot paper, but try using a large sheet of tissue paper or thin white paper to get far more folds/points and a large, ethereal white snowflake.  Again, newspaper is great to practice on here; the paper thickness and size is perfect for these kind of stars.



The visual steps are set out below, and here’s the lowdown:

  • Take a large sheet of paper and fold over an inch – you can measure this but I always do it by sight; these stars can cope with a bit of innacuracy!  Flip the paper over and fold it back again by the same measurement to create a concertina fold.  Repeat this until you run out of paper or have at least 4 full folds.
  • The more folds you have, the fuller and more ornate your star will be.  I’d practice on newspaper making one with lots of folds and one with fewer (like mine), to decide which style you prefer.
  • Trim off any leftover paper, making sure that your raw edges are both pointing down (like the first pic below), and you haven’t been left with a half-fold; if you have, just trim it off.
  • Fold your concertina in half to find the middle point, and then draw freehand a pattern which looks symmetrical on both sides (fig 3).  Make sure that you are keeping most of the folded side intact – I’ve just made a couple of circular patterns as you see – and cutting mostly on the side with the raw edges.
  • Cut out your pattern, holding the concertina tightly together, and then add a stitch in the centre (fig 4)
  • Fan out your concertina and spread and flatten the points out to form your star
  • Flip it over and staple the raw edges together on each side to form the star
  • Tada! Congratulate yourself and hang it in the window for all to admire…

Experiment with drawing different designs and seeing the effect that they have; my curvy drawing produced these fat, cheery stars.  Creating more folds and drawing a pattern with straighter lines and more geometric angles makes for a more icicle-like, frosty snowflake which would look beautiful when made on pure white or sparkly paper.

FInally, if after all of this you’ve caught the star-crafting habit, here are a couple of other ideas to try;

Let me know how you get on if you try these, and have a great weekend when it arrives.  We have Harry’s actual birthday tomorrow, and of course the first day of Advent so will be starting our advent tree which has now been laden with tiny boxes in the playroom.  The first snowfall of the season is rumoured, so we are waiting with slightly bated breath; it would be just too perfect for it to arrive on a birthday Saturday, but we’re hopeful nonetheless!

Hand & Footprint Reindeer Cards

November 27, 2012 By in Making, Paper Paper! Tags: , , , , , , 11 Comments

A little midweek creative fun for you if you have little people around (or just a very large sheet of paper if using your own hands and feet; well, why not?).  Harry and I like making homemade Christmas cards, but unless you make them all in one long afternoon, it’s an activity you have to start early and do in fits and bursts of enthusiasm in order to have your finished beauties ready for posting in good time.  Harry has a typical toddler attention span so we will usually make 2 or 3 cards before the temptations of lego / the biscuit tin / muddy puddles lure him away, leaving a glittering array of half-glued creations and festive painty footprints in his wake.

This year we’re making hand and footprint reindeer.  It sounds – misleadingly –  like possibly the easiest project ever, as it simply involves painting your child’s hands and foot and pressing them onto a sheet of paper.  If you have a baby who can be strapped into a highchair for this, it’s ideal.  If you have a mischievous toddler who makes it his mission to evade your clutches and is slippery as an eel, then it is a battle of wits and cunning.  Huge fun, but wait for a clear day and try this outside if you can…

To make this, you’ll need child safe paints (fingerpaints, powder or poster paints are ideal; anything that won’t cause a reaction on the skin and will be easy to wipe off), eyes, red pom poms or buttons and scraps of gift wrap.  We also used little paper snowflakes cut with a craft punch, and glued on a bell. Brush the paint onto your child’s hands and one foot (a tip; do this one at a time, or your child will turn into a paint octopus and you will have no hope of co-ordinating anything).  Press each one firmly onto a sheet of white card stock.  If your child is old enough (or very young), you can probably get the placement right first time, but if not just get them to stamp lots of handprints and footprints, and you can cut out the good ones and arrange them collage-style afterwards.

Fig A: When crafting with a calm and cooperative child who has not consumed any sugar lately:

Fig B: with a more conventionally unpredictable toddler, just cut out 3 good prints and arrange them onto a fresh piece of card in the shape you want.

Once you’ve made your reindeer head, you can embellish it however you like – this is great fun for older children, or something you can do yourself if your toddler has lost interest, or is not yet dextrous enough to do the sticking and decorating.

We trimmed ours and mounted it onto a sheet of A4 sized red card stock.  It’s a picture rather than a stand-up card, but can easily be propped on a mantel or pinned to a kitchen noticeboard to add some festive cheer.

When we’d made a couple of these big pictures (and before we glued on eyes and embellishments), we took a photo of the reindeer, uploaded it and used it to print off lots of smaller ones onto pre-folded A6 blank cards – this is a great way of mass-producing your original art without the stress…

As you can see, using different sized eyes gives some very different and comical expressions.  Each reindeer will look very different depending on the print and the size and shape of your child’s hands, so make them look as original as they are!

I’ll be back later in the week with some festive stars and also the results of my weekend willow-weaving course (but really, there’s no need for bated breath and huge anticipation of majestic willow marvels I assure you; let me manage your expectations in advance ;-) )

Setting Sail!

November 23, 2012 By in Baking Tags: , , , , , , , , 24 Comments



‘Tis done! Construction on the birthday boy’s pirate ship is now complete, on schedule and on budget (and is possibly the only piece of construction ever done in our house which can make these claims).  Nobody would ever be bold enough to certify this seafaring vessel as watertight or fit to conquer the seven seas, but our fondant pirates don’t seem to mind.  It does at least creak authentically, due to the weight of the chocolate ganache, and lists atmospherically to one side, though this is more attributable to my lopsided baking than to the ocean wave.

Thank you for all the helpful comments and tips; I now feel like a fully-fledged member of the birthday-cake-baking community, at least for the next 10yrs until Harry officially declares homemade party cakes to be a bit lame and embarrassing, at which point I will hang up my spatula with a mixture of profound relief and dismay.  For those who are interested, allow me to take you on a tour of our galleon…



Our cheery-looking skipper is brandishing an unlit sparkler, ready to fire the canon; we’ll light this at the moment critique in lieu of candles.  The canon and canon balls are sculpted from fondant, rubbed lightly with edible silver dust and accessorised with silver balls.  A hidden cocktail stick secures the canon ball in the mouth of the canon; I’ve instructed my husband to try to rescue all the cocktail sticks before the eating begins.  He’s an ex-surgeon after all; he’s used to counting instruments in and out of cavities).  The steering wheel is the only inedible component, borrowed from Harry’s toy pirate ship when he protested that his cake must have a steering wheel; how right he is.

I made the sails by printing onto sheets of regular printer paper and then rubbing them with used teabags, and setting light to the edges.  It was a useful, if unintentional, way of checking that our smoke alarms are working well. (In my defence; yesterday was a VERY cold day to be faffing around outside with such things).  The bunting is not especially pirate-like, but makes our cake jolly rather than fierce, which is important when you’re staring down the barrel of only your third birthday.  I glued scraps of gift wrap onto sparkly thread and trimmed them into flag shapes.  The flags themselves are winched onto disposable BBQ kebab sticks.

My pirates are not afraid of their feminine side; they sport rose-gold earrings and suffer from rather womanly physiques; I left them looking perky and muscled and then came down this morning to find they had wilted into a sort of pear-shaped, who-ate-all-the-pies type slump. Pirate 2 looks like he is accessorising his outfit with a carefully chosen Chorizo sausage; it’s actually supposed to be a blingtastic gold trophy belt..

An equally heavyweight crow sits in his nest, surveying the seas; he wisely decided not to chance his luck on top of the mast and has taken up station at the rear of the ship instead, where a life ring is within easy reach if necessary.

So that’s all for now; we have a busy weekend ahead with Harry’s party, a grandmotherly visit, and also – excitingly – an away day for me and my mum to try a taster day of willow sculpting. Each year we try a course in some new skill which we are convinced will change our lives; industrial blacksmithing was one, flower painting another (we tend to extremes, as you see).  Mostly we drink a lot of coffee (or wine), gossip and plan projects way beyond our talent.  Tomorrow, for example, we have been led to believe we may create one of these;

Whereas I am secretly hoping I might knock up a herd of these, ready to strap to the roof of the car…

We shall see; I’ll let you know how I get on.  I’ll be back next week with 3 different kinds of stars to make for Christmas; have a wonderful weekend in the meantime, and a belated Happy Thanksgiving to all my lovely readers across the pond!

Willow image credits; 1)  Tir Grug Willow, Wales,  2) Cove Garden Nurseries, Devon

Sweet Treats and other Projects…

November 20, 2012 By in Baking, Making Tags: , , , , , , , , , 26 Comments



We’ve been busy in the kitchen this week, making edible gifts designed to stimulate the appetite of Harry’s fairy Godmother who is currently recovering from surgery.  I’m the first to admit that my kitchen skills leave something to be desired; my husband was mildly astonished by my culinary incompetence when we married – my party trick was to peel off the film from a microwave meal with one hand whilst programming it with the other – and things have improved only slightly since then.  As such, Harry and I look for recipes which produce stunning results but require very little skill.  Often, we make them up as we go, as we did with these White Chocolate and Strawberry Pastilles (above); a perfect Christmas gift for a foodie, and startlingly simple to make.  Our Edible Gold-leaf Florentines are a cheat’s version of the classic florentine, as we simply sprinkled the chopped fruit and nuts on the top of ours, before daubing with edible gold leaf…



To make these, you’ll need…

  • white and milk chocolate (chips, chunks; you choose. We used 200g of each and produced a LOT of sweets!),
  • freeze-dried strawberries – try the home-baking section of the supermarket, and if that fails you can of course use sprinkles, balls or cake decorations instead, as shown below
  • for the Florentines; a selection of chopped nuts and fruit.  We had candied peel, raisins, glade cherries and flaked almonds in the cupboard already so used those, but chopped mixed nuts would be great.
  • I used a silicone macaroon sheet from here to get perfect shallow discs, but if you don’t have one lying around (and who does, frankly?), just drop small dollops of the melted chocolate on a baking sheet and flatten and shape into rounds with the back of a teaspoon.

For both the pastilles and the florentines, melt your chocolate in your usual way (experts whizz it in the microwave; I am not very vigilant here so prefer to melt it over boiling water on the stove, using the double-bowl method).  When melted, drop small spoonfuls into your mould or onto your baking sheet, and smooth the tops with the back of a teaspoon.  Leave to set for about 10-15 minutes; you don’t want them to harden, but simply to lose some of their runniness so that the topping doesn’t cause them to spread and spill.  Now you can add your topping; for both recipes, just sprinkle your chosen topping over the chocolate discs.  For the florentines, I placed a flaked almond on each then sprinkled the chopped fruit on top.  Don’t worry if they scatter everywhere; once the chocolate is fully set you can retrieve stray fruit, nuts and sprinkles.

Now pop in the fridge for an hour to harden. Once hard, you can gild your florentines (and then remember to tell your friends later; ‘what did I do today? Well, y’know, gilded my florentines…’.  Take a clean paintbrush and use it to dab a little edible gold leaf on to the top of each one.

Once you’ve done this, you can taste-test them with any small kitchen helpers, before wrestling the remaining few precious sweets away so that you have at least a handful to package up as a gift..

I packaged our white chocolate and strawberry pastilles in a little gift box, layering with white baking parchment.  For the florentines, I used the cracker templates from the last post to make a pretty cracker using sturdy gift wrap (birdcage wrap from here), and carefully stacked the florentines in there.

A word of advice; store these beauties in the fridge until you’re ready to use them, and encourage your recipients to do the same; like all chocolate which has been previously cooked, it will take on a slightly dusty greyish appearance if you just store it in a cupboard – the taste won’t change, but they’ll be at their most shiny and gorgeous if you keep them chilled.

Other things….

Crackers!  Thank you to everyone who shouted ‘Yes PLEASE!’ last week in the cracker snap giveaway; Harry made the draw last night and later this week crackers will be winging their way to 10 readers across 3 continents.  A number of you asked where to buy snaps from so that you could source them yourselves, so I’ve done a bit of research and here’s a start point for you…

  • In the UK, try here for different sizes packs of snaps or here for cracker kits – or ebay.co.uk which always has a few sellers
  • In the US/Canada, try here for online ordering, or US friends tell me that Michaels often stocks them near the gift wrap in store at this time of year
  • For Australia and New Zealand, try here (they also shop to certain other countries)

The next big DIY; I’ve just sourced this slightly mouldy and very cheap bookcase on ebay to make Harry’s Christmas present; a play hardware store and garage (I know, I know; go with me on this one….).  He loves his kitchen and shop, so this is the last piece of play furniture that we have room for; I’m thinking petrol pump, pretend car wash – I’ll keep you posted!

The Impossible Pirate Cake: and finally, my birthday cake pirates are taking shape!  I’ve found it’s actually quite therapeutic rolling fondant in front of the TV of an evening, glass of red wine in hand – kind of like the grown-up version of Play-doh.  I’m still trying not to think about how I make the actual cake/ship itself..

A Cracking Christmas!

November 15, 2012 By in Making, Paper Paper! Tags: , , , , , , , 78 Comments



A recent – if brief – snowflurry in our village brought thoughts of Christmas to the fore.  Not practical thoughts of course; the turkey remains unordered, the cake unbaked, and the annual pre-festive season plan to lose 6 pounds in readiness for vast amounts of eating has not even crossed my mind.  Okay, it crossed it, but was quickly relegated to the dusty mental file marked ‘mañana’. No, it’s thoughts of décor and gift-giving that are proving deliciously distracting, and so I’ve embarked – very slowly – on the construction of handmade Christmas Crackers for everyone who’ll be around the table for Christmas Day lunch.



I hadn’t appreciated what a peculiarly British tradition crackers are; originating in the 19th Century and traditionally filled with French bonbons (there! Don’t say you never learn anything from me…), they are now a great British institution without which no Christmas table would be complete.  Come December 25th, families up and down the country will be bedecked in dreadful tissue-paper hats, sharing cheesy festive jokes and examining the tiny plastic gifts contained within, as the smell of gunpowder from the cracker snap threatens to overpower the turkey.

This year for the first time I wanted to make my own crackers and avoid the mass-produced, expensive ones.  I used Kate Lilley’s beautifully simple template  and instructions, and blew it up to 150% before printing onto white heavyweight watercolour paper, to create my understated and slightly ethereal oversized crackers, to which I then added strips of gift wrap, monograms and ribbon, tied with festive polka-dot bells.

I wanted mine to be big enough to house a small but carefully chosen gift, so this year my recipients might get a French milled soap, a LEGO city mini man set, or a bicycle inner tube (I know, I know… families, eh?).  No cracker would be complete without a seriously bad joke, so I’ve trawled the internet for the very best I could find and added those too, along with some festive confetti.

The most important element is the cracker snap, because Christmas just wouldn’t be Christmas without someone suffering heart palpitations at the sudden loud bangs caused by cracker-pulling. Cracker snaps are notoriously hard to come by, so as well as sourcing my own, I’ve gathered a small stash of sets of snaps to giveaway if you fancy making some of these yourself; details at the end of the post.

Given the need for clean fingers and craft knives, I’ve obviously made these ones without assistance from my mini-helper, but Harry and I will also be making more of these easy crackers together (below) as gifts for his friends and nursery teachers.  Using toilet rolls and glittery crepe paper (and snaps, of course!), they are simplicity itself, and look pretty and festive, especially when filled with chocolates and candy canes – and sparkly nail polish for the teachers.  It means saving up an awful lot of toilet rolls, but I have a toddler who is still thrilled to have graduated through potty-training and to have discovered the flush toilet, and so have time – and approximately 1,000 bathroom visits – on my side.



So; Christmas Crackers two-ways, depending on your staying power and inclination; a lovely DIY project to contemplate at this point before the mad rush takes over and you declare yourself insane for even contemplating frivolities such as this.  As well as accessorising the Christmas table, they also make beautiful boxes for important small gifts.  Like jewellery  (she said, hoping her husband is reading..).

If you fancy making crackers yourself, I have 10 sets of 10 cracker snaps to give away; just leave a comment below along the lines of ‘yes PLEASE!’ to throw your name into the virtual hat and I’ll get Harry to pick at random and be in touch re your details; the near weightlessness of the snaps means I can send them around the world without having to send Harry out to earn a living just yet.

I should reassure regular readers that these last couple of posts don’t signify my whipping myself up into a full-tilt Christmas frenzy in the middle of November; rather, I am distracting myself from the thing I should really be focusing on; Harry’s birthday is in two weeks and he has indicated that what would make him happiest in the WHOLE WORLD would be a giant home-made birthday cake, shaped like a pirate ship.  With real pirates.  And a parrot.  And a canon.  And… well, you get the picture.  Yikes.  Watch this space…

Black & white image credit: Imperial War Museum, London.

Preparing for the big countdown…

November 9, 2012 By in Making, Paper Paper! Tags: , , , , , , , 36 Comments

 

 


Whilst Christmas is still some way off (thankfully), Advent is fast approaching.  This week I’ve spent the evenings cosily wrapping a myriad of tiny boxes with surprises, notes and treats for Harry to uncover through each day of December.  I’ll string them from an armful of silver-sprayed branches and position them in the hall where they can offer a tantalising reminder of the excitements to come.

For my advent boxes I’ve used a random collection of matchboxes, raisin packets (both full and empty), old jewellery boxes and others, and used  offcuts of white, red and brown paper to wrap them all with scraps of ribbon and silver thread – each one is different, but the repeating colour palette gives them a harmonious appearance when hung from the branches. I’ve used pretty buttons and embellishments extravagantly because I know I can just gather them up once discarded in the thrill of opening, and reuse again next year.



A number of the advent boxes contain chocolates, raisins or other sweet treats, but there are some surprises too; I found this tiny nativity set here, and have packaged each member up individually and spread them across the month, so that Harry can collect them all and we can tell him the Christmas story as we go… there are also a couple of decorations to hang on the tree as Christmas approaches.

With Harry’s birthday falling in early December, we’re anticipating something of a swelling of the toy cupboard next month, so one advent box provides a bag for him to carefully choose some toys he’s grown out of and no longer plays with that we can take to the local charity shop to be loved again by someone else – and to create some crucial space for new arrivals.  At risk of sounding pious, I want Harry to understand how lucky we are, and from the outset to see Christmas as a time of giving as well as receiving.

Harry’s advent calendar also marks a few of the events that we know will happen over the month; the nursery school nativity play falls in the middle of December, and Harry has been cast as Joseph (how my heart secretly swells with maternal pride!  Harry himself is a bit cross because he wanted to be a reindeer).  It’s the first time he’ll have performed in any kind of play or production, so feeling the safety of this ‘magic button’ in his pocket may help keep wobbles at bay when he sees us in the audience.

The most important box of all will be opened on Christmas Eve, and is immediately identifiable by its sparkly gold exterior.  Inside, Harry will find a tiny letter from the elves, sealed with a button, explaining all the things we need to do to prepare for Father Christmas’s arrival (carrots for Rudolph, stockings over the fireplace and a myriad of other anticipation-building activities..).  There are also a couple of little treats for the elves themselves; a tiny half walnut-shell bed, with a down feather to ensure the softest nap ever – because they must be exhausted at this point in the year, and everyone benefits from a power nap –  plus a few ‘elf donuts’; Cheerios sprinkled with powdered sugar (in case Harry is tempted to sample one himself).



If you fancy making one of these for the little (or not so little) people in your life, here’s a wee list of some of the other things in our boxes (just don’t tell Harry…)

  • Chocolate ‘gold’ coins and racing cars
  • Lego mini men
  • Raisins
  • A handful of ‘snowballs’ (white pompoms) to thread together
  • A few real coins for Harry’s moneybox
  • Paper chains to make to decorate the playroom

What Christmas traditions do you have for your children? It’s the first year that Harry is really, properly aware of Christmas and excited by it, so it feels like the first time we can start to create some family traditions and memories for him; all further inspiration welcomed please!

Have a wonderful weekend…

A little birdie SOS call

November 1, 2012 By in Green Fingers, Homing Instinct, Making Tags: , , , , , , , 32 Comments

In the aftermath of Sandy across the Eastern Coast of the US, our week of wet and windy weather here seems to pale into insignificance. I hope that if you’re reading this from across the pond you’re safe and well, unscathed by the havoc the storm has wreaked.  In our small corner of England, the stormy weather is proving traumatic for the garden birds arriving here for the Winter months.  Stories abound of weary birds dropping from the skies into the waters around  coastal harbour towns, metres from reaching dry land, after days of flying in battering, gusty winds.  Harry and I have decided to launch our own garden bird SOS by making a myriad of DIY bird feeders, to welcome the exhausted new arrivals and help to fatten them up for the chilly months ahead.

Making birdseed feeders is one of the messiest and most fun kitchen projects; it’s incredibly simple, gratifyingly mushy, and very forgiving; if your mixture hardens before you’re done, you can just warm it up and start all over again.  We made a mixture of feeding balls and cookie-cutter shapes, pierced through with straws to create a hanging hole for thread…

Some of these looked so pretty that I think we’ll make them again to accompany Christmas gifts for our green-fingered friends and family members.  Others looked so vast and lumpy that we had to search out very hardy branches to hang them from; I suspect that any robin or chaffinch brave enough to tackle one of those will have trouble getting airborne for a while afterwards..

The other glorious thing about these is that even the most haphazard and amateur cook can manage it (that’s us, of course…).  As long as your ingredients are in proportion to each other, you’ll be fine. So, grab a cup or  a mug and measure out:

  • 4 cups of birdseed (we chose a winter bird mix, with differing sizes of grain to attract different birds)
  • 3/4 cup of flour
  • 3 large spoons of golden syrup (corn syrup)
  • 1/4 cup of hot water, in which you’ve sprinkled and stirred a sachet of powdered gelatine (find these in the home baking section of supermarkets)

Mix all of these together in a bowl. Have lengthy and circular conversation with any young children about why this is one recipe where they are not allowed to lick the spoon and/or bowl at the end

Spoon into pre-greased cookie cutters, using your fingers or the back of a teaspoon to squish the mixture into the edges and compress it down; the more firmly you can pack it, the easier it will be to hang and then peck. For the birds, that is.  Resist the urge to peck at them yourself.  Poke a chopped up piece of straw into each to create the hole for hanging.

After a couple of hours of drying, ease them out of the cookie-cutters and remove the straws, then turn over, so each side can harden.  Ideally leave them overnight for this stage.  If you need to free up the kitchen counter space, you can pop them in the freezer for an hour instead, which does the trick.

Finally, thread a piece of string, cord or ribbon through each, ready to hang; we chose bright ribbon to attract the birds, and to give us something cheerful to look at through the kitchen window..

So now we’ll retire indoors, and await the happy sound of chirruping and crunching from our feathered friends.  At least, that’s what I have assured Harry will happen.  I suspect that in fact I will be bursting through the door again in minutes, shrieking at the squirrels who will descend upon our efforts with glee, as the neighbours look at me, baffled at such random behaviour.  Such is life…

Follow

Get every new post delivered to your Inbox.

Join 2,463 other followers