Christmas Treats | Finding Feasts

Christmas Tree Ice Cream Cones — Click image for recipe

You would have had to been living under a log the last few weeks to not know that it is Christmas in 11 sleeps!

I am a Christmas junkie! I love the food, the wine, the decorations and of course the planning which starts for me as soon as humanly possible! Our Christmas tree goes up religiously on the 1st of December however if the 1st should happen to fall on a week day then you can legally without offending the Christmas spirits put your tree and decorations up the weekend before! Decorating is a huge event, the boxes come out, the Buble Christmas tunes are pumped and I plot around the house with with a glass of champagne whilst Imogen decorates the tree. The hubby on the other hand prefers to have a beer or two at the local, however he is getting better with the decorations going up!

It turned out that this year hubby had two work functions each night so paper art decorations in hand Imogen and I decorated our lounge and dinning room. Very proud of our colour coordinated efforts!

Back to the food aspect of Christmas! These little ice cream cone Christmas trees are too easy to make and the kids will love helping decorate them!

You need to ensure that the ice cream freezes well otherwise it will melt too quickly when you take the cones out. Although we didn’t have this problem, they were all gobbled up within seconds of coming out of the freezer!

If you have a Christmas inspired desert then please feel free to share!

Merry Christmas and Wesołych Świąt!

Bella 🙂

Traditional Finnish Gingerbread Biscuits – Piparkakut … If I were to choose one thing that is significantly Christmas to me, and for most Finns I would assume it would have to be the mounds of gingerbread biscuits that come out at this time of year.

My Nana has always been the one to stock the family with these delicious, spice laden, thin crispy biscuits. She would have tins of them, and knowing how much my sister and I loved them, would keep a continual stock of them throughout the year that we would have with coffee along with other lovely sweets.

I recently acquired a Finnish cookbook published in 1966, Kotiruoka by Uusi Laitos (translates to Home Cooking or something very similar) This is Nana’s and has been well thumbed through. It has nine different recipes for gingerbread cookies… NINE!

The Finnish/Nordic way is to have them neat, no fancy icing decorations and the shapes are simple hearts, stars and a scalloped circle… although I have, in the last several years, started a little tradition with my son and we now decorate large cookies cut from my gorgeous Donna Hay Christmas Bauble Cookie Cutters. The large size means the cookies can be intricately decorated and look stunning (my son channels Jackson Pollock when decorating these)

This amount makes about 50 cookies depending on the size of your cutters, but believe me they will disappear, and very quickly! Going with the FinSki’s theme for edible gift ideas, package them up in little bags or old biscuit tins and give them as gift.

Hyvaa joulua! Blondie