Shopping For Christmas Trees, Decorations, Biscuits and Cookie Cutters

Traditionally a tree was a green real tree brought indoors, when it was too cold to go outside, and decorated with lights to brighten dark days. You may like to think of it as pagan. Or you may prefer to remember that Queen Victoria and Albert started the fashion.

Now you can buy or make white trees, blue trees, red trees, biscuit 'trees' - whatever takes your fancy to celebrate Christmas, holidays, whatever.

Take a trip to a garden centre such as Squires in Stanmore and nationwide around England, or a supermarket, especially those with an outdoor garden section, such as Waitrose in South Harrow or Harrow and Wealdstone, and you will see trees, real or artificial, for sale.

Stuck indoors with a cold, working? You can order artificial trees or decorations from all kinds of shops and supermarkets, to name only a few: Tesco, Argos, The White Shop.

In the old days you made decorations out of foil-wrapped chocolate or biscuit to hand out to family and guests.

Now you can make an entire tree of biscuits only as a table decoration. Supermarkets sell individual biscuits in tree shapes.

Many biscuit cutters (to American cookie cutters) are sold, or given away 'free' on magazines. I looked at a set on a magazine in Waitrose. But the cost was around £5 and I did;t need the megazine. Last year I was desperately keen to buy sets of festive cookie cutters and bought two magazines from a Tesco Express because I liked that year's cutter offer. This year I bought a set with a tree in Morrisons, Hatch End, for only £1. I wondered whether they were price matching the pound shops.



http://www.sainsburysmagazine.co.uk/recipes/baking/biscuits-and-cookies/item/christmas-cookie-tree

Angela Lansbury, travel writer and photographer, author and speaker.
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Flying on Thanksgiving and Owls You Can Make For Thanksgiving

When are the flights empty? Apparently if you want a choice of seats, pick Christmas Day, and in American Thanksgiving Day.

If you are in the USA (fourth Thursday in November) you will be surrounded by people celebrating Thanksgiving, and eating turkey.

Some people like to give guests a take home present. I love these owl biscuits you can make at home wherever you are on Thanksgiving and give to your hosts or guests. Also a great gift to take to a pot luck party, A book group, Writers' Circle, or a Toastmasters meeting.

Two great ideas you can copy, even if you don't have time or reason to make owl biscuits this week:
1 Use a glass tumbler as what the Americans call a cookie cutter.
2 Use balls of dough for decoration, add chocolate buttons for buttons or eyes, use almonds for beaks or claws of birds or animals.

https://blog.etsy.com/en/butter-cookie-owls/

The story of Thanksgiving, according to this account, was not just a dinner thanking God for a safe arrival, but both the God or fate and the natives (then called Red Indians) who had taught the Pilgrim Fathers (and mothers) how to draw and cook local foods. The dinner included turkey, shared with the natives, cranberry, so named because of the stalks bending like cranes.

http://www.crewsnest.vispa.com/thanksgivingusa.htm

If you are not American, you might wish to celebrate Thanksgiving with the Canadians, who celebrate on the second Monday in November.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Thanksgiving_(Canada)

Angela Lansbury, travel writer and photographer, author and speaker.

Dessert Delights & Free Cookie Cutters For Your Xmas Tree Cake Top

Delicious desserts at the ADELPHI HOTEL - a tiny paragraph in the Daily Telegraph newspaper alerted me to this hotel in Melbourne, a city I visited some time ago. I remember it's long restaurant street with lots of Italian style restaurants and touts outside every door tempting you with offers of a free drink, free dessert, two for the price of one, ten per cent off. Now something even more tempting. A dessert bar.

In a hotel with a dessert theme. Bar stools like liquorice. Candy patterns on the carpet. Toffee apples on check-in.

Popcorn in bedrooms. A macaroon at turn-down time.

The hotel is a local landmark with a glass bottom swimming pool jutting out over the street.

I tracked down the hotel website on Tripadvisor and saw the photos by visitors. Finding the hotel's own website was surprisingly challenging, as I kept trawling down websites which wanted to book me a table.

Finally I found the hotel:

adelphi.com.aus

Then I found the restaurant with the menu and pictures of the desserts.
http://omnom.kitchen

One of the offerings is a variation on the French religieuse, or nun. A kind of snowman, or rather snow woman, made of profiteroles with a ruff of cream, which I had seen at a restaurant show in London. (Mentioned in an earlier post by me.)

Unfortunately I am unlikely to get to Melbourne in the near future, not for Xmas. But what can one do at home?

If you want inspiration for making your own desserts, sandwiches or a child's lunchbox, check out Grace Hall's creations.

http://www.dailymail.co.uk/femail/food/article-2610244/Packed-lunches-look-good-eat-Creative-mother-turns-picky-sons-lunchboxes-works-art.html

For special occasion birthdays, I like the cakes in Jan Asher's book.

Christmas/Hanukah cookie cutters
Getting ready for Christmas, I just bought two copies of Essentials magazine number Xmas issue from a Tesco Express in order to get the metal cookie cutters.
One set consists of a Christmas tree, six pointed wiggly edge star, and bell. The other set has a five pointed straight sided star, an angel (I thought it was a gingerbread man until I looked closer) and a J shape candy cane.

A six point star was on a mince tart at the end of the set meal at the Civil Service Club Xmas dinner.

The Xmas cutter will do for cutting biscuits or sandwiches. I plan to use if for icing shapes to stand up or lie flat on a fruit cake with a white icing top.

More Cutters From Morrisons
For only £1 in Morrisons you can get three large cookie cutters with a seasonal them in red plastic. The designs I was for three: Xmas tree, star, and another.


Chocolate Moulds
If you want to make something more elaborate, you can buy chocolate moulds for hearts and other shapes from China online from Ebay or in the UK from Lakeland (online and various branches including one in Watford. Lakeland has sets of mould for making your own chocolates and a larger mould for a train.

Back to where we started: The desert restaurant in the dessert hotel:

Adelphi Hotel

187 Flinders Lane 

Melbourne 

Victoria 

VIC 3000

Australia
Ph: (+61) 3 8080 8827
omnom@adelphi.com.au

Lakeland has 68 stores in the UK with a kinds of gifts and gadgets for the kitchen and home.

www.lakeland.co.uk/StoreLocator‎