Sunday

One advantage of having hearing aids (among many) is that once they are out at night nothing disturbs me.  So, while I gather that it has been a wild and woolly night round here judging by Facebook comments, I heard not a sausage and slept like a log all through!  No flooding - an advantage of living in a 'dry' part of the country - either.  But my heart goes out to those who are been affected by this latest bout of terrible weather.

I was expecting to have Beth and Alex round for lunch but Beth is very busy with this and that so I am going over to help her sort a few things out.  That means I won't be at home for most of the afternoon.  At there is a bit of a tradition that the Infant coordinator provides drinks and nibbles for the Christmas Show meeting, I set to early this morning and made some mini mince pies with a star on the top.  They were dead easy.  Mince pies are easy anyway but these are easier than most.  For a start, I used shop bought shortcrust pastry and mincemeat.  I always buy pastry, it's not something I have a light hand with at all.  I ought to make mincemeat - it's easy and frugal and very tasty, but I simply haven't had the time.  One of the things I will do after retirement - and I will probably make lots, tie it all up with festive tops and ribbons and give them as Christmas presents.

I digress, sorry.  OK, so I bought pastry and used a mini muffin tin with a little doofah thingy that I got ages ago at a Pampered Chef party.  All you do is roll a bit of pastry into a ball, drop it into one of the muffin holes and then push the doofah thing (wish I could remember what it is called) into the pastry which magically rises up the side to make a neat little case.  Dead easy and trouble free.

Ah, found it by Googling - it's called a 'mini tart shaper'.  Such an original name!!!  Here it is:
http://www.pamperedchef.co.uk/ordering/prod_details.tpc?prodId=1746&catId=122&parentCatId=122&outletSubCat=
Well worth getting if you do much of that sort of thing.

So now I have twenty four mini mince pies cooling on the rack awaiting a shower of icing sugar and packing into a tin..  It sounds a lot but there will be at least seven of us there, so that's only three each and they are tiny.  And a few might go missing on the way too!
Now I'd better go and sort out the kitchen.

Afterthought:  I always find it odd that a blogging site run by Google doesn't have 'Googling' as a word in its spell checker!