Christmas Gift Guide for Grown-ups

I love Christmas. I love it even more now I'm an adult and can enjoy the indulgent delights of booze-soaked Christmas puddings and warming sips of mulled wine. And there's the food too, of course: spiced, fruit cakes, citrus, sweet treats and deliciously steamy puddings covered in custard or a dollop of cool, whipped cream. That's why for this year's Christmas gift guide, I've chosen to feature the kind of food and drink I'd love to find in my own stocking on Christmas morning. The kid's Christmas lists can wait - this is all about us.

8 Top Tips For Keeping Everyone Safe On Fireworks Night

As we approach Winter and the nights draw in, this is a fantastic time of year to enjoy the spooky, sweet and spiced delights of Halloween and the wonder of Fireworks Night. But much as it's a great way to spend a evening together as family, attending a fireworks display comes with some obvious risks. 

Here are some tips for keeping everyone safe this Fireworks Night.

How To Make Homemade Turkish Delight

I absolutely love making yummy treats that I can gift to family to friends at Christmas. A few years ago I made fig, date and onion chutney which I gave away with a little bottle of my red berry liqueur, each wrapped with a twist of festive ribbon and tied with brown labels suitably marked 'Eat Me' and 'Drink Me'.

This is another of my favourites. There always seems something indulgent about Turkish delight. It's something I don't eat all that much throughout the rest of the year but come wintertime, I can't help but make up a batch.

What's more, it's so unbelievably easy! I mean, who has time for faffing when there's mulled wine to be drunk?

TrackR pixel - Review and Giveaway!

I dislike stereotypes. That said, I am stereotypically bad at finding ANYTHING in my handbag beneath the crumpled up receipts, used tissues (I know - gross), boiled sweets and biros. So you can understand the predicament I find myself in when having to search not just my handbag but the whole house, quite often to find my keys which one of my darling offspring has decided to pilfer and hide.

So you can guess my delight at being offered the opportunity to review the TrackR pixel bluetooth locator. It's a clever little device which allows you to locate lost items via an app on your smartphone. 

How To Make Home-Cooked Potato Peeling Crisps

This recipe for home-cooked potato peeling crisps from BBC Food popped up on my Facebook feed the other day and I knew immediately I had to give them a go. Okay, so they're probably not the healthiest snack in the world, but you need something to crunch on in between slurps of cool, crisp chardonnay, right?

The recipe appealed to me for a number of reasons: they're very simple to make, they require very few ingredients, and they are a great way to use up the peelings leftover from a mashed potato masterpiece.

I'm also hoping that the next time we have friends over for nibbles, it'll make me look like some sort of fantastic snack wizard. Fingers crossed.

How to Make Homemade Red Berry Rum

It's sad to think we're moving into Autumn and towards Winter but, to cheer you up when the nights start closing in and the kids have walked puddles of muddy slush all through your kitchen, here's a delightfully warming recipe I picked up from Good Housekeeping magazine back in 2011. The good news is that this only needs a month at most to mature and doesn't need any specialist equipment, so you can easily start it in the next month or so and it'll be ready for Christmas. Then all you have to do is pop on your slippers, curl up with Strictly and enjoy a tiny tot of this gloriously rosy liquid sipped from your favourite glass.

Despite having pasted this recipe into my recipe scrapbook six years ago (how is it that long ago?) this is actually only the second time I've made it. Though not due to any fault of it's own, that's for sure.

PJ Masks Magazine - Review

I'm not sure I can remember a time before PJ Masks was in our lives, it's now such a firm favourite with the boys, especially Little O. So I was absolutely thrilled to be given the opportunity to review the brand new PJ Masks magazine which went on sale this month.

How To Make Homemade Red Gooseberry Wine

When my mother-in-law passed me the massive bag of red gooseberries, I had two choices: I could either make them into something to eat, or something to drink. Taking the vote to social media, the response was overwhelmingly in favour of the latter (no surprise there).

My next choice was whether to follow the recipe in my 'Drink Your Own Garden' book which happens to be as old as I am (no googling, please!) or to just ask my mum who, by all accounts, has been home-brewing just as long. 

Maybe it was giving birth to me that turned her onto it, who knows?

Anyway, again I chose the latter. Mainly because I find mum's method much simpler and also it requires less jiggery-pokery involving enzymes and other chemicals I've never heard of.

8 Times I Missed Out On A Celebrity Autograph

David Beckham

I was walking back from my lunch hour, and had just turned the corner out of Carnaby Street when I happened to glance up at a man walking past me in the opposite direction. He wore a baseball cap and was surrounded by five or six men who looked like they worked out regularly. 

It was only after he'd passed me by that it struck me. Hang on, I thought. Was that who I thought it was? Surely not, could it be? Yes, yes it was. 

You might know him as 'Becks', 'DB7', 'Golden Balls', 'The Beckster', 'Becky From The Block'*, 'Lord Beckingham', or as I like to call him, simply 'our Dave'. It was, indeed, Mr David Beckham. 

8 Fashion Trends I'm Glad To See The Back Of

We've all had our 'off' days, the fashion world included. Here's a few gems that I'd be more than happy not to stumble across in Vogue ever again (Okay, you got me - so not Vogue, maybe Look or the fashion page in the Evening Standard...):

1. Harem pants

Just – nope. You know who they look good on? Aladdin. And his genie friend. Certainly not me, that’s for sure.

Taste Inc - 100% Chargrilled Chicken Fillets - Review

It should be plain to anyone who follows my blog that I'm a big fan of food. And when Taste Inc got in touch and asked me to review their 100% Chargrilled Chicken Fillet portions - Ready To Eat - how could I refuse?

Each of the two flavours I was sent, 'Original' and 'Spicy', came in handy 35g pouches as part of a 5-portion multipack strip so are perfect as an on-the-go snack. 

8 Alternative Ways to Spend Valentine's Day

It’s that time of year again: the minivan flower-sellers are out, Clinton’s shop-fronts glisten, red-glittered and teddy-beared, on the high street and you can’t buy your M&S lunch without having to skirt the mountain of champagne bottles in the walkway (how very middle-class, daaarling).

Oh yes, what a wonderfully lovey-dovey, cuddly-wuddly time of year, a chance to snuggle down with a glass of plonk in front of a roaring gas fire and Love Actually. An opportunity to spend some quality time with your partner/spouse/family member/dog/cat/Xbox/that-bloke-from-Take-That’s discarded fag butt you traded your Discman for, back in 1994.