Christmas Cards

We have done our usual photo Christmas card with Jackson and the doggies this year. However, as well as this, I thought it would be nice if Jackson and I made our own cards too, to go with the Ginger Bread Men decorations we have already made for gifts to our family. These home-made cards would be just for a few people, same as the decorations because otherwise we would be making them until after Christmas! 

I told Jackson that I would be painting the bottom of his foot and he got quite excited! 

I really struggled to find brown paint, so I just mixed red and green to make a shade of brown. I covered his whole foot in the paint. 

Then we printed it to the card. 

After it had dried, we stuck on some googely eyes and made a glitter nose. I did the antlers myself (impressive, I know!).

I was so pleased with how they turned out, what do you all think?

Love Sophia xxx

Sweet Chilli Jam

Hampers are always a popular gift at Christmas time and they can be made as cheap or as expensive as need be. Homemade gifts can be really good to add to them too, not only is it cheaper but it's also nice to receive homemade products. 

I am not actually doing any hampers this year but I really like making Sweet Chilli Jam. We quite often buy it but every year, at Christmas, I tend to make a big batch of it (I am not sure why I only do this at Christmas to be honest, maybe because it takes so long to get through it all!). 

The recipe that I follow is another one from Good Food, and here it is... 

Ingredients:

8 x Red Peppers

10 x Red Chillies - I used mainly green ones this time as that's all the shop had!

1 x finger piece of Ginger 

8 x Garlic Cloves 

400g of fresh tomatoes - the recipe says tinned but I like using fresh and I don't peel the tomatoes either, but if you're not a fan of the skin then I would recommend sticking with tinned!

750g Golden Caster Sugar 

250ml Red Wine Vinegar 

A side from the mountain of sugar in the back of the photo, the colours look amazing! 

For the first step, you need a food processor. Mine is a really cheap one from Argos that I bought about 6 years ago but it does the trick (I want to buy a new one but this one just keeps going!!!).

Hint: Because there was so many ingredients, I blended them in batches, chopping everything up a little smaller before putting them in. 

Next, put everything in a large pan - I used my large Le Creuset pot which is my most used kitchen pan, I absolutely love it!!!

Bring the pot to the boil and then the recipe says to leave to simmer for 50 mins. However, I followed this and found that it needed much longer, about an additional 40 mins!  

Once you have finished cooking, leave the mixture to cool and then decant it into your jars/containers. You can buy many different sizes of jam-styled jars, depending on how many people you are giving it too, but as we are just keeping it for ourselves (may give some away but we'll see) I added it to 2 separate jars. 

We use the Sweet Chilli Jam with loads of different things, the obvious one being with cheese and biscuits - which we love but we only really have around Christmas. Some of our other favourites include pimping up a fish pie (mixing it with Quark or Philadelphia makes a normally average fish pie delicious). Some people just use it on toast but I'm not really a fan of that. 

Let me know if you have made this or if you make anything similar! 

Love Sophia xxx

DIY Gifts

Last year, I made some salt dough ornaments, with Jackson, as gifts for family members. I loved doing this but thought that I would get my creative-hat on and think of something else to do this year...

I took a trip to Hobby Craft, (be warned, anyone thinking of visiting with a toddler - I took Jackson with me and he took the basket around with him and filled it up very quickly!). Jackson loved all of the shiny ballon weights, paints and Christmassy bits. We did also have a melt down though, when I took the basket off of him to pay for only a small selection of the items he had put in there!!

Eventually we came out with these Ginger Bread Man hanging decorations.

One of Jackson's favourite things is painting, so I thought that this year I would just let him get stuck straight in with the paints. I picked a festive green and red for the main colours.

I waited until they were dry and then gave him the glue and some glitter to have fun with!

I am so happy with how they came out, Jackson seemed really pleased with himself too! 

I just added his name and the year on the back. 

Have you done any DIY gifts with your little ones this year? 

Love Sophia xxx