The Splat Cooking Blog

It’s been ages since I’ve written anything. It’s our busiest period at Splat between September and December, Christmas starts in August and hits big time in September so by December we’re all exhausted but glad to have some time off with our families.

In our house the Christmas tree went up mid October as I was doing a photo shoot for The Times for Edible Christmas Pressies article which went out on 22 December. It was very odd trying to encourage the children to make up the recipes in October Half Term knowing perfectly well that they wouldn’t be edible by Christmas but with the promise of their photos in a national newspaper they succumbed to the pressure. Maisie, who’s 8, was really chuffed that she had almost a whole page of her photo in, Max was happy enough to have a smaller photo with the breadsticks he’d made himself and Ellie was a little put out not to have her photo in but she did have two photos in the article back in April so that made up for it. If you want to have a look at the article and try out some of the recipes have a look at this linktimesonline

Ellie and I have just finished making and decorating a gingerbread house. Actually, shouldn’t say ‘we’ as Ellie made it just about all by herself, I think the only input I had was to get the ingredients out for her and help her lift the cut out pieces of gingerbread onto the baking tray – that way if I dropped them she could yell at me rather than herself! Oh, and I mixed up the royal icing for her and made the piping bag, that was all, everything else she did herself and it’s a fabulous house.

I’ve promised Max I’ll make a gingerbread train with him during the holidays. This will be good practice as we launched our own range of Gingerbread Houses this year and they have gone down a storm even though we missed the copy deadlines for a lot of the foodie mags. We had a lovely lady in Devon make them for us last year but she couldn’t keep up with demand so it’s just kicked us into touch to do it ourselves, or rather Christine’s done it for us.Christine is one of our main party organisers and trainers, she’s a trained chef and used to be the patisserie chef at the Royal Berkshire Hotel but with three children cheffing doesn’t fit in family life so we’re really happy she’s now a major part of the Splat Team. Anyway, Christine had spent the past 3 months making gingerbread, seriously, making gingerbread. To the extent that her children have opened the fridge on a number of occasions to ask ‘Mum is there anything to eat except gingerbread?’, her lovely husband Richard is buying her a bigger fridge in the sales!

We did buy in some other gingerbread houses to taste but they were horrible, tasted like dental mouthwash and we wanted to sell gingerbread house kits which tasted great as well as were fun to make and decorate. Next year we’re expanding the range and looking at doing Nativity Kits, Gingerbread Train Engines and probably Noah’s Ark Kits too, hence Max and I are practicing the Train this week.

Christmas lunch this year was goose – all down to Maisie and if you want to read the full story on this click on this link as this was featured in an article I wrote recently for Channel 4’s food websiteChannel 4The end result was lovely, the children weren’t too keen, the dog loved it and we really enjoyed it, a little bit like the dark meat of a turkey, yummy cold with cranberry relish too.So, now Christmas is over and things calm down slightly I will make a concerted effort to blog more often, we’re off to see Enchanted this afternoon after climbing a big hill with the dog and tomorrow I start Marathon training seriously – 2 hour run with big hills and my mate Jamie yelling at me to stop talking! Have a great New Year.