pretty paper. true stories. {and scrapbooking classes with cupcakes.}

The semi-finals of the Great British Bake-Off have been and gone and taken at least a metric tonne of chocolate in their wake, along with one more baker. Three whole rounds of chocolate, chocolate, and more chocolate this week: a signature chocolate tart, a giant chocolate soufflé for the technical, and a chocolate sculpture showstopper that went a bit mad really! Flying high in my tiny kitchen thanks to patisserie success with a star baker nod, I desperately wanted a go at that chocolate showstopper, but alas my last two bakes have taken so much time that I really couldn’t bring myself to spend an entire beautiful sunshine-filled family weekend shoved in the kitchen, so the chocolate tart for me this week. But not without a little bit of extra something, because I am apparently incapable of leaving well enough alone. Consider it my tribute to the baker on the show who seems to have the same problem!

Maybe it is the early Christmas paper crafting this year that has me thinking peppermint already or maybe it’s because someone asked me last week what I missed from America and I replied ‘Other than family and friends, probably Girl Scout cookies’. Anyway, chocolate and mint and an attempt to remember the finer nuances of the Girl Scout Thin Mint were on the agenda. Side note: I was definitely respectable at selling Girl Scout cookies as a small child, and once had someone order thirty-two boxes of Thin Mints all in one go. I have no idea if that was a year supply or her Christmas shopping for everyone else or something else creative. I just said thank you a lot and left with a big smile on my face. Second side note: Girl Scout cookies have come up in conversation a great many times since I moved to the UK. It is a surprisingly high number of people who assume the cookies are actually made by the Girl Scouts, leading many to confusion over why something would be so universally lauded when it would be like any bake sale, and completely a cookie roulette as to whether your local scouts were talented bakers or far from it. Alas, they are made in a factory and the scouting part is the selling and delivering. I know your life is richer for knowing that, yes?

For the chocolate pastry crust, I actually started with the same cookie base I used last week, but halved in size, and added extra butter, cocoa powder, and icing sugar to make it more a buttery and crumbly chocolate pastry rather than a cookie. Have to say this is a spot where I can see they are just cutting corners to make drama on the show – I have never met a chocolate pastry that wasn’t improved by a few hours chilling in the fridge. Taking that extra time away, the bakers end up with a sticky and unpredictable mess.

For the chocolate pastry, combine half of this cookie dough recipe with an extra 50g butter, 20g cocoa, 50g icing sugar, and 1/2 teaspoon peppermint extract.

Butter a tart tin and line the bottom with parchment. Roll out the pastry and press into the tin. Pierce several times with a fork. Bake for 10 minutes at 180C. When out of the oven, press into the pan with the back of a spoon or a pastry tamper.

Then there are two chocolate fillings: a rich, set chocolate mint ganache and a shiny, lighter chocolate mirror glaze. The mint ganache definitely puts this into Thin Mint territory for me. To make it look the part for a Christmas party, I tried making peppermint meringues to mimic peppermint candies, which were easy enough if you have a pretty liberal definition of ‘mimic’!

For the chocolate mint ganache, heat 350ml double cream in a saucepan until it just starts to bubble. Remove from heat and add 450g dark chocolate, broken into pieces. Let it just sit in the pan for about two minutes, then stir slowly to mix. Stir in 70g unsalted butter and 1 teaspoon of peppermint extract. Pour into the pastry crust and chill in the fridge.

For the chocolate glaze, I followed this tutorial, with 4 sheets plain gelatine, 125 ml water, 225g sugar, 150g dark chocolate, 30g sifted cocoa, and 65ml double cream. I would suggest going as dark with the chocolate as you can – I made it with 60% chocolate and it is very, very sweet. There isn’t a great deal of it in a single serving, so that might be okay as a contrast to the richness of the ganache, but I think if I was using these steps again, I’d be tempted to go for the 85% chocolate instead. Pour over the cold tart once the ganache has set, and put it back in the fridge to set again.

For the meringues, I tried dried egg white powder for the first time. I used four sachets, which is equivalent to four egg whites, and mixed to the instructions on the packet, which is basically six teaspoons of warm water per sachet, gradually mixed. Then whisked with the mixer with 1/4 teaspoon cream of tartar and a pinch of salt until soft peaks formed, then gradually added 300g sugar while it continued to whisk away, eventually turning into pillows of white meringue. Meringue takes on flavour extracts to an extreme so it only took the tiniest few drops of peppermint to make a very minty meringue. The red is a gel food colouring drawn inside the piping bag in a few lines, then fill the piping bag with the meringue and pipe circles onto baking parchment and dry them out in the oven on low heat. These small meringues took about 45 minutes at 100C, and kept their white colour. Too high a heat will turn it yellow!

These amounts actually made a bit too much ganache and glaze and a heap too much meringue, so we also had enough for three little layered chocolate pots, with the remaining double cream mixed up for a vanilla whipped cream to balance all that chocolate and peppermint!

Great Bloggers Bake Off is organised by Jenny at Mummy Mishaps. See more bloggers’ bakes this week at participating blog, Baking Queen 74. Please no spoilers from the actual show in the comments, for those who watch later than the original broadcast! Thanks.

Comment [19]

I think you will love today’s guest project – I really do! I’m not sure I’ve ever seen a page made by Nancy Damiano that I didn’t love. Her style is so clean and crisp but detailed and nuanced. It’s just always a breath of fresh air to me. I miss working with this lady all the time – she was also a Garden Girl back in our Two Peas days – and I’m so happy she is able to join us here today. Please welcome Nancy! -Shimelle

For my layout I was really inspired by Shimelle’s Scrapbooking Colour Schemes with Pink layout. The first thing that caught my eye was the beautiful colour scheme. I love bold pops of colour and this layout delivers. I also like linear designs that feature repetition of a shape or element. The repeated hearts on Shimelle’s layout inspired the band of painted wood veneer featured on my page.

Let’s take a look at this tutorial on how to dress up plain wood veneer and create a bold band of repeated shapes:

It’s a lot easier than it looks isn’t it? Using supplies on hand like a stash of veneer shapes and acrylic paint can add dimension, style and a splash of colour to your layouts. Individually, the painted veneer may not look like much but take a look at how repetition adds a punch of wow to a plain background.

Adding a small stamped sentiment to a layout lends a nice handmade touch. The fuchsia ink provides a nice contrast to the white card stock.

The fun painted accents and colourful patterned paper are the perfect background for these photos from Disneyland. They tell the story of a whimsical, happy place from the start. This layout is the opener for my Disneyland album and showcases the ‘where’ and ‘who’ went. The heavily embellished page is a delightful way to begin this story.

If inked hearts inspired painted wood veneer, what’s your next step in this bit of creative Chinese Whispers? We’d love to see what you’re inspired to make today.

Nancy Damiano lives in New Jersey with her husband, son and a gaggle of nieces and nephews she adores. She has a passion for the color aqua, Disney, and anything paper + craft. She currently designs for Simple Stories, Scraptastic Kit Club and Scrapbook & Cards Today Magazine. You can find more of her work and life at her blog, Instagram and Pinterest. You can also find a lovely collection of process videos on her YouTube channel.

Comment [7]

After last week’s Quidditch Cake, this week’s bake off brings such excitement! The Quidditch Cake won the honour of Star Baker and Tesco sent me a £20 gift card toward this week’s bake: patisserie week! I’ve often heard it mentioned in terms of hunting or farming or something that if you want to eat meat, you should be comfortable killing your dinner. I don’t eat meat so that entire concept just makes me queasy really. But I’m all about adopting this idea as a new motto when it comes to patisserie. I will make patisserie bakes once a year just to go through the magnitude of the entire dish to then have full respect every time I go into a diabetic coma while looking at a glass cabinet of fancy pastries. (Maison Bertaux, I am looking at you.) This bake required more dishes than I actually own, to the point that I had to wash my mixing bowl three times in the middle of all this, but I’m getting ahead of myself.

Patisserie week was the quarter final and filled with three time-consuming challenges in the tent: a signature challenge of two kinds of cream horns, a technical challenge called mokatines, and a showstopper that involved eclairs stood on their ends and layered until they resembled either a nun or a dalek. Seriously. I nearly went for the nun/dalek option, because every year I watch patisserie week and note scornfully that I have never actually made ‘creme pat’ as they are so fond of saying, and surely I should learn to do this. But I couldn’t get over the fact that the nun that remained standing was coating in so much molten-sugar-glue that it just didn’t seem like it would be fun to actually eat. And that technical challenge was mocha flavoured. Coffee and chocolate and cake IN THE SAME BITE. I should never have doubted that this was the way forward. After trying to follow Mary Berry’s recipe for the technical last week and deciding she was a bit out of her tree with the estimation of preparation, I thought I’d take her recipe as more of a starting point and make it my own this week. Well, my own, with a big helping of inspiration from Flavourtown. London has a lot of cupcake bakeries and I have tried pretty much all of them. The only one I love without question is Flavourtown. Giving up my nigh-on weekly treat of a Flavourtown cupcake has been very sad and I have stood there on multiple occasions asking myself if maybe I wouldn’t mind a few days of hives for the glory of that cupcake. (Oh how I hope this is a temporary sensitivity I can grow out of, because I think I might need to just wear long sleeves and a ski mask if it’s going to go on forever. My will power is wearing thin.) They have flavours I dream about, and one of my absolute favourites was a cupcake that combined an Oreo cake with a chocolate ganache centre, and a coffee buttercream. Completely over the top. Completely amazing. Surely I could take that idea and apply it to those dainty little Mary Berry Mokatines? This was the plan, at any rate.

This is a complicated plan when it requires gluten-free Oreos, basically, which is not a thing we have here. Google tells me they exist in some part of the world, but not here. I read a few recipes and most of them depended on that lovely replacement potato starch, which I can’t eat either. I guessed at some flours I had and came up with a rough draft of my own Oreo recipe. It just seemed to take a million ingredients, and I hadn’t really started with the actual mokatines yet. Oh well.

These were made with 75g sorghum flour, 95g tapioca flour, 45g corn flour, 50g cocoa powder, 1/2 teaspoon baking powder, 190g sugar, and a pinch of salt stirred in the mixing bowl, then 115g butter, 1 egg, and 2 tablespoons of cream added and mixed until it came together like a pastry dough, then wrapped in cling film and chilled for a few hours.

Then rolled out and chopped with a cookie cutter and baked for ten minutes at 180C, and moved to a wire rack to cool.

I think I may tweak this recipe over time. Straight out of the oven, they taste a little too much of the tapioca and I’d like the cocoa flavour to be more overwhelming like a real Oreo. The next day, they were a bit softer than an Oreo too, rather than crispy. But they aren’t greasy like a real Oreo, which I presume is because these are made with butter and Oreos are made with shortening… and I think I’m okay with having just the flavour and not the grease! I’m liking these, but I think they can be made perfect with a few tiny changes.

Then time for the genoise sponge to get the actual mokatines started. This takes far fewer ingredients than the chocolate cookies! I liked that this week’s episode let us know a bit about how their technical instructions are written, and apparently it just said ‘make a genoise sponge’. I think I might have given up right then. I wish they would publish the recipe as they give it to the bakers and then also post the full version. It seems they do neither really, as the whole point of a genoise sponge (as they told us several times in the narration of the episode) is that there is no chemical raising agent – no baking powder or the like – it all has to come from the whipping of the eggs. Then I pull up the recipe on the BBC website and it lists self-raising flour as an ingredient. Well, that’s not exactly right then, is it?

I used 40g butter, 3 eggs, 75g sugar, 35g sorghum flour, 20g tapioca flour, and a tablespoon of cornflour, basically following the Mary Berry recipe but no self-raising flours involved. Much egg whipping involved. Many bowls involved. And following my belief that YouTube can provide instructions for pretty much anything, I followed this video for tips…

And it worked!

What I didn’t have was the specified seven inch square tin, so I used an eight inch round tin, and a pastry cutter to make round cakes. I considered buying a new tin, but the cupboard with the baking tins is already one where you have to kind of push it all into place and let go at the very last second as you latch the door closed. I really shouldn’t buy a new tin for my once-a-year dip into patisserie, I suppose.

Time to make the first of three frostings that make this all come together. I suppose I have only myself to blame, because Mary Berry doesn’t use chocolate ganache. She uses a combination of apricot jam and fondant. The woman is obsessed with apricot jam, from what I can tell. It’s her version of edible glue, and it is in so many recipes. But I don’t actually like the taste of apricot jam. Nor the taste of fondant really. But you know what looks great on the top of a cake AND has the adhesive qualities of apricot jam? Chocolate ganache. There is no room in my life for apricot jam where there could be chocolate ganache.

100g of double cream, 100g of 85% dark chocolate, and 100g of 40% milk chocolate melted together made a pretty good amount for these cakes, and into the fridge it went for more bowls and more frosting.

I tried to follow Mary Berry’s recipe for the coffee buttercream. In fact, I followed it twice. One of these bowls is the second attempt at that recipe and the other is a coffee buttercream I’ve made so many times I could make it in my sleep. I couldn’t get the instant coffee to dissolve in the butter no matter what, and it just came out a terrible mess and went in the bin. Yet another reason I would have been kicked out of the tent by this point. But making a buttercream with butter, icing sugar, vanilla, milk, and a tiny bit of concentrated espresso? That worked, and I can say with experience that it tastes very nice on a homemade Oreo.

This post is getting ridiculously long, much like the process of making these tiny cakes. Suffice to say the crème beurre au moka, or coffee-flavoured French buttercream, basically, is really really good. Once again, YouTube delivered all the secrets I needed.

So that is three bowls of different frostings plus a bowl of crushed faux Oreos, ready to turn that light little sponge into something completely and totally over the top.

Delicate sponge rounds cut into layers! Centres piped with delicate coffee buttercream!

Then came the part where they ceased being delicate in any fashion because they were coated in ganache and rolled in cookie crumbs.

Delicate is overrated.

French buttercream piped around the edges, and they are finally complete!

It took two days and every bowl I own to make eight tiny cakes. Once a year is enough for patisserie week, I think.

But it won’t take two days for them to disappear. Cookies and coffee cream and chocolate and cake. It’s all my food dreams in one. Happy (yet dangerous!) times.

Great Bloggers Bake Off is organised by Jenny at Mummy Mishaps. See more bloggers’ bakes this week at participating blog, Bluebird Sunshine. Special thanks this week to Tesco, who sent me a gift card, and have a big section of baking recipes on their RealFood site. Please no spoilers from the actual show in the comments, for those who watch later than the original broadcast! Thanks.

Comment [32]

Today I’m delighted to welcome Alissa Fast, who I ‘met’ when she first signed up for a class many years ago. Since then, she’s done Christmas journals and Learn Something books aplenty, amongst all her other lovely projects! I hope you love her inspiration for getting more from your phrase stamps. -Shimelle

I love roller stamps. It’s that simple. I’ve always loved roller stamps and it all started with an office supply store date roller stamp so many years ago. Today the roller stamp has evolved to a supply I cannot live, or scrap, without. They just add that special touch to all of my projects. Sometimes a finishing touch. Sometimes as the journaling. Sometimes as a design element. Always something. Shimelle went a step even better with this little set. The notepad that comes with the True Stories Roller Stamp is so versatile and, well, amazing. I loved working with it to create these fun projects and I hope you find them inspiring.

The card.
I started with a fun card for my sweetie. I punched out a couple labels from a sheet of the notepad and strategically layered papers from the True Stories collection, washi tape, letter stickers and a phrase from the roller stamp to personalize my card. Layering papers, washi tape and letter stickers are my go to techniques when scrapping.

The layout.
I really wanted to tear off a bunch of the notebook pages and layer them up for a background page. Reminds me a bit of a messy pile of papers and I love all the layers. I stamped all of the ones I could still see with the “be happy” phrase and made it my tile of the pages. Lots of layers, staples, a little glitter and stamping. These are a few of my favorite things.

The planner.
Next up was the September monthly spread in my home planner. I love my planners because they help me “make it happen” every day. They keep me on task, which I love. I snipped off the top of one of the notebook sheets and stamped it with the “make it happen” phrase as the title to my month. I stamped random, appropriate, phrases to my special days in September and added a few bits from the True Stories Die Cut Cardstock Shapes. This spread just makes me happy to look at it and really motivates me to get things done. Don’t forget your scrapbook supplies are perfect for decorating your planner pages. I find it’s a great way to use up your stash.

The pocket page.
I think pocket pages are my favorite to scrapbook lately. Each little pocket is like a tiny little scrapbook layout or page in a mini book. I find that they also come together pretty quickly. Here, I selected a cut apart page from the Tue Stories collection and a page from the roller stamp notebook to fill the pockets. The notebook is the perfect size for 3×4 pockets and it’s a perfect spot for the journaling on this page about my niece’s recent 10th birthday. I also punched out labels from another sheet of the notebook to add to each of the other 3 3×4 cards with a stamped phrase from the roller stamp. Staple them on and we are good to go! The perfect little design element on this page!

The mini book.
My last project is a mini book I made out of tags and 4×6 photos. On each of the tags I layered a sheet from the notebook and stamped it with a different phrase from the roller stamp. This mini book came together fairly quickly by using the same design idea for each page. I just varied the washi tape, die cuts and photos to provide a little variety, while still keeping the whole book cohesive.

Now, I encourage you to take one of these ideas for the phrase roller stamp and notebook set and make it your own. There are so many uses for a roller stamp that I didn’t even get to them all. You could stamp them all over the page, or pocket card, as a background element (similar to the “to do list” card on my page layout) or add them as a simple journal element on the photos in a mini book. So many ideas I could go on for days! I hope you’ve enjoyed these ideas and have been just a little bit inspired.
Thanks for stopping by today!

Alissa Fast lives in Ferndale, WA with her hubby of 28 years and her beloved cat, Stormy. She loves taking photos and documenting her everyday life. Her all-time favorite scrapbooking products are her tiny attacher stapler and washi tape. The last thing she made was a mini book about her family’s last trip to the pumpkin patch last fall. See more of her work on her blog, Instagram or on Facebook . She also designs for Cocoa Daisy, Simple Stories and Elle’s Studios.

Comment [5]

The seventh week of this year’s Great British Bake Off and we’ve all gone back in time to Victorian Week, apparently. Because everyone is just super excited to enter the tent and find all the power-boost ovens and pastel Kitchenaid mixers replaced by ovens with fire and an old wooden spoon. Okay, they didn’t go quite that far, but there was an antique pie tin! There was also a signature challenge of a game pie (no thank you) and a showstopper that sounds amazing but requires five and a half hours of bake off time, which translates to five and a half years of normal kitchen time, leaving the technical challenge: Victorian Tennis Cake.

Nope, I’d never heard of it either.

I haven’t attempted a technical challenge yet, so off I went with Mary Berry’s recipe, which has an ingredient list so long I could take a photo of it pre-cooking because not only could I not get it all in the shot at once, I couldn’t get it all on my kitchen counter at once. It takes basically all the things no one buys in the grocery store (like glycerin and liquid glucose) plus a farm worth of eggs and a wheelbarrow of sugar and an orchard of fruit. At first I thought if this is roughly authentic to a Victorian recipe, surely it must have been the reserve of the esteemed upper class or something, then I noticed Mary’s timing requirements. She reckons you can prep this cake in thirty minutes, cook it for two hours, and then be done. I can assure you Mary Berry is not a muggle and just guessed at how long it would take a muggle to make this in a muggle kitchen and her guess is not accurate in any way. Therefore, there was no other way forward but to embrace the real Victorian roots of this cake, and shun all things tennis in favour of the far more obvious choice: Quidditch.

Should you wish to make this cake, I assure you the rest of Berry’s Muggle instructions work perfectly well. It took me closer to an hour just to chop all the fruit and nuts for a cake that is essentially fruit held together by some flour and egg rather than cake dotted with some fruit. I imagine Mary has quicker ways for this than such simple tools as a chef’s knife and a chopping board.

I changed out her self-raising flour for something I could eat without losing my own magic powers, and subbed 100g oat flour, 100g sorghum flour, 50g rice flour and 2 teaspoons of baking powder for her 250g self-raising flour.

I made both the marzipan and the fondant. I’d never made marzipan and had no idea it was made with raw egg, but this explains why I could eat it in the same way as cookie dough. Be impressed there is still some left on the cake, frankly. It’s also dangerous knowledge that it was ridiculously easy to make. Hilariously, the recipe calls for the marzipan to be made with that well-known Victorian kitchen gadget, the silicon baking sheet. I used a spatula and it was fine, I swear.

Fondant I had made once before, for a three tier Christmas cake last year that I hoped would look like something out of a magazine and unfortunately I didn’t specify in my hopes that the magazine not be entitled ‘Play-Doh Creations by Toddlers’. This time, the fondant was a huge success and smooth and even! Take that, Tiny Muggle Kitchen!

Then the decoration was royal icing, which I don’t think I’ve made since I whipped up one of these amazing creations for the Johnson County Fair in the summer of 1989. MORE EGGS. Seriously, Mary Berry is keeping chickens in that bake off tent. (Or dare we think there is some sort of chicken animagus possibility?) Anyway, having gone this far with the recipe without resulting to any sort of cheating magic, I embraced the full Muggle experience of piping placing the goal hoops while balancing a curious child with one hand, so they are wonky but not as wonky as some of those tennis courts on this week’s episode. Random trivia: Quidditch hoops became a regulation size during the Victorian Era. Mine may not be to scale.

I’ve sent the Quidditch cake off to the city today but made this tiny loaf with a bit of the mix so I could still try it and have a verdict. It works as gluten-free, though it needs a fork! It was strange to make an entire cake without vanilla extract in anything. And also… in a country that celebrates fruitcake, I’m a little confused at the idea of fruitcake without booze. Not that it’s not a nice cake without it, just that the two seem to go together here on so many occasions that it is almost a little unfinished without. This could definitely work for a wedding or Christmas cake with the sheer amount of fruit. But most definitely Mary Berry is completely out of her tree on the timings. Plan for an entire weekend unless you have earned Exceeds Expectations in Potions, I’m telling you.

Great Bloggers Bake Off is organised by Jenny at Mummy Mishaps. See more bloggers’ bakes this week at participating blog, An Organised Mess. Please no spoilers from the actual show in the comments, for those who watch later than the original broadcast! Thanks.

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Thank you so much for the amazing response to Christmas Magic! I am so, so excited to see it arrive in stores this month and to see your projects come to life with this paper version of my childhood Christmas memories! I am really quite speechless reading your comments. Thank you times infinity!

Here’s my first page with this collection on my actual desk! The only things I added were a pinked circle punch, some Amy Tangerine washi tape, gold Color Shine mist, and a brown precision pen and ink pad. Everything else is Christmas Magic!

But it’s also time to open reservations for Christmas in a Box 2015! (That’s last year’s box in the picture! All new kit coming for 2015, of course.)

If you’re new to Christmas in a Box, you can have a look at the 2014 box to get an idea of how much it includes: papers, stickers, embellishments, custom stamps (in fact, this year there are two sheets to the stamp set) all designed to be used throughout December, but also be versatile at other times of the year, so many of the papers will include a non-seasonal b-side, for example, and the stamps have a variety of holiday phrases and more general motifs for documenting life. This year’s box will contain a noticeable amount of the Christmas Magic collection, but will also include elements from a range of other releases that I’ve chosen to coordinate. The kit does not include an album, as Journal Your Christmas participants have long embraced a variety of different formats for their finished projects and I embrace that variety and creative freedom. (I will also say it does not include the paper chains die set. I’m really excited about those dies, but I don’t think everyone who usually orders the kit necessarily has a die cutter, and it would really reduce the amount of other fun stuff in the box!)

There are three reservation options: a box to a UK address, a box to an address anywhere else, and just the stamps.

If you’re in the UK, you can reserve a kit that will be packed on my very own hands and sent to your door. It’s a £5 deposit with a balance of £35 due at the time of shipping, with the shipping aim for these to arrive with you to be crafting on the first of November. (This is significantly earlier than 2014, and I’ve made sure some things are already in place to make sure everything moves promptly!) The total £40 price includes the postage. You can simply pay £5 now to guarantee your kit, then the £35 balance will be due when the kit is ready to ship to you. If you choose not to pay the remaining balance for your kit, the £5 will not be refunded and you will not receive the kit, but that’s all: no further action will be taken.

If you’re elsewhere in the world, I have a way for you to get the same kit that will ship from the US instead so we don’t just zig-zag boxes all over the world. Rather than clicking to pay to reserve your kit, I need you to send me an email with your name and your zip code (for the US) or your town and country (rest of the world), and I will reply to you directly with the rest of the info you will need to collect your deposit and balance.

For both of the above options, your kit will be reserved ten days from the first invoice to pay the balance. I’ll email at least two more reminders before the tenth day. On day eleven, I’m going to go ahead and list those boxes for sale at the full price. If there is some extenuating circumstance for you around the time of the balance being due, I’m hoping ten days is enough time for you to at least get in touch, and that way I don’t need to build my own Christmas tree out of unclaimed boxes or anything else a little crazy. If you don’t feel that time frame is fair, don’t reserve a kit. You can always make your own kit by shopping at your favourite retailer. I’m hoping that seems pretty sensible and fair.

If you just want the stamps, you don’t need to pay a deposit but you can reserve a set by sending me an email with your name and shipping address. (Please note, that is a different email address to the kit option above, so be sure to click the one you want.) This year’s stamps will be two 4×6 sheets of high quality, made in the UK clear material to be used on an acrylic block – the same manufacturing process as last year but with two sheets and all new designs. Last year these sold out far more quickly than I expected, so I’m adding this reservation now in hopes there will be more happiness at receiving your stamps than sadness at missing out. Plus they will ship faster with the addresses all ready to go. Yay!

Reservations for all three options will remain open until the 24th of September. There will also be a number of kits and stamps available for purchase without a reservation, but that number will be very small.

You don’t need to participate in Journal your Christmas to purchase the kit, and the kit is not required to participate in Journal your Christmas. It’s just for fun, and it can be a great way to treat yourself to a lovely mix of brand new products for Christmas crafting when the calendar is extra busy with holiday celebration leaving you little time to shop. In case it’s not obvious, Journal your Christmas will run again this year. It had a big refresh last year and will have a few smaller updates this year, and you can sign up at any time and have access to all the materials from previous years. (Rest assured, all previous participants are still welcome to join in at no extra cost.)

I think that’s everything! Any questions, please feel free to leave a comment and I will email you a response.

Comment [44]

After what feels like an eternity of staying quiet about it, I’m delighted to shout from the rooftops about something I’ve been working on this year: a brand new paper craft collection for Christmas 2015! It’s called Christmas Magic and ships to retailers this month. This is my third collection with American Crafts, and I’m so excited to be using this along with some other favourite products for my 2015 Christmas journal and Journal your Christmas class videos (more about that at the end of this post) but for right now, I just want to share it with you and offer you a chance to win some of it for free while we’re at it!

There are three sets of Thickers: Fitzgerald in red glitter, Eclair in black foam, and a new design called Starlight that features the numbers 1 to 31 (plus some star accents) with gold foil detail on cream chipboard.

I’m so excited to put this to use all over the place this December: it’s a set of four dies that create paper chains to decorate your tree, your fireplace, your classroom, your office computer, your presents, your dog… whatever will sit still long enough is fair game, I think!

I wouldn’t blame you for sticking a tinsel bow on everything either. I probably need a whole extra pack just to stick on members of my family at various moments throughout the season. Of course.

Some tried and true embellishments: rub-ons that include quite a few small phrases perfect for small format albums, pocket pages, and Christmas cards as well as the finishing details for larger projects like 12×12 pages, wooden buttons with epoxy designs in the centre, and enamel ‘dots’ with holly leaves.

And no shortage of stickers, for sure. Choose from a 6×12 sheet of cork stickers with white, red, and green designs or the 4×8 sticker sheet with words and phrases on one side and an alphabet on the other, or…

…chipboard stickers in two styles – either with lots of dimension and layers of chipboard or just a teensy bit of dimension in a single layer of chipboard, both with foil details to finish.

And of course, there is paper. Pattern paper as we know it and some special papers too, including things like gold foil on vellum. Prefer to see the collection on video? Well I can help with that. I even broke out the gold glitter and navy blue French manicure! (I think I’m saving the red and gold for nearer to December. I don’t want to peak too early, after all.)

As mentioned in the video, this collection will of course play a part in something I do every December: Journal your Christmas. I’ll be using a mix of this collection and other elements in my own journal and in the Christmas in a Box kit, which you can reserve from tomorrow should you wish. We’ll talk all about that tomorrow, when I’ll also be sharing my first Christmas Magic process video! I hope you’ll stop by to take a look.

For now, if you leave a comment on both this post and this one on the American Crafts blog, you’ll be entered to win a Christmas Magic prize pack! Which piece do you hope to find by the time your Christmas tree is up this year?

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This week’s bake off baking went a bit differently in our kitchen. I went through my usual phase of reading eleventy million recipes before coming up with my happy medium somewhere in the middle, with notes on the back of an envelope, because it’s not like I have a single sheet of useable paper in this house. Made a shopping list. Then we went out for one of those family Sundays wherein you try to take part in as many free local events as physically possible (classic boat display with jazz band, Discover Viet Nam festival with children’s crafts and water puppetry, harvest festival at a royal orchard, and still home by 3!) and The Boy volunteered to go get the items on the shopping list while I took a very sleepy Wonder Boy home. Excellent! And then after dinner, The Boy volunteered to prep my pastry. Even better! And after that, he just kept emerging from the kitchen to ask what was next, until he had made the entire dish.

Is this what head chefs do? Shout the recipe out to the next room, then get to eat the first slice without having to actually slave over the hot oven or clean everything up? Because I now see that is a pretty awesome set up. I tip my hat to you all. And to The Boy, because I say without any doubt that this dish was nothing short of epic and the pastry had the perfect finish on the bottom. I’m not even saying that just because he managed to do all of this and leave the kitchen cleaner than he found it. This was just way better than it would have been if I made it.

The trick to the balanced flavour is the layers, I think. The fruit on the top is glazed and sweet (well, sweet for fresh figs, not like candy or anything), the frangipane is like amaretto without the sharpness, and the ginger layer gives it some heat to keep things interesting. I’m so glad they featured this on pastry week this season as it’s never something I would have planned to bake otherwise. Or planned to have someone else bake, for that matter.

For the pastry:
50g finely ground almonds
40g oat flour
60g rice flour
45g sorghum flour
40g sugar
1/4 teaspoon salt
70g unsalted butter – cold, and chopped into small pieces

For the ginger glaze:
100g fresh ginger
25g sugar
25ml water

For the filling:
50g unsalted butter
70g sugar
3 eggs
80g finely ground almonds
30g oat flour
1/2 teaspoon baking powder
2 teaspoons ground ginger
2 fresh figs
1 pear
Honey and maple syrup – roughly a tablespoon each

For the whipped cream:
150ml whipping cream
1 tablespoon sugar
1 teaspoon ground ginger
1/2 teaspoon vanilla extract

Preheat oven to 180C. Prep tart pan with parchment paper in the bottom and butter on the edges.

To make the crust, mix all the dry ingredients in a blender or food processor, then add the butter and pulse until it forms a dough. Press into the prepped tart pan, covering the bottom and all four sides. Use a fork to perf the base every few inches. Bake at 180C for 10-14 minutes, until golden brown. We didn’t bake with weights, but did press the crust with the back of a spoon as soon as it came out of the oven to mould it to the shape of the pan a bit better.

To make the ginger glaze, peel the ginger and chop into fine slices. Simmer with the sugar and water until the ginger is soft and the water starts to become a syrup, either in a saucepan or in the microwave. Place on top of the pastry, so the end result will have a thin layer of sweet ginger between the pastry and the frangipane.

To make the frangipane filling, cream the butter and sugar until fluffy, then stir in the eggs one at a time. Add the dry ingredients (almonds, oat flour, baking powder, ground ginger) and mix until well incorporated. The batter will be thicker than a sponge cake but more liquid than cookie dough. Spoon into the pastry case and even out to fill.

Slice the figs into thin rounds with the skin intact. Peel and slice the pear into even segments. Arrange the fruit on top of batter in the pastry case.

Cover the exposed pastry with a strip of aluminium foil, and bake at 180C for 30-35 minutes, until a toothpick comes out clean and the fruit is all cooked.

Once out of the oven, transfer to a wire rack and brush on a glaze of equal parts honey and maple syrup.

We served with ginger whipped cream, which is the only part I actually made with my own two hands this week. Whipping cream, sugar, vanilla, and ground ginger simply whisked until thick and fluffy!

Now you just need to find someone to volunteer to do all the shopping, baking, and cleaning, and you are set!

As always, if you’ve come to this recipe because it’s free of one thing or another, please know your own tolerances and read your labels.

Great Bloggers Bake Off is organised by Jenny at Mummy Mishaps. See more bloggers’ breads this week at participating blog, Nobody Said It Was Easy. Please no spoilers from the actual show in the comments, for those who watch later than the original broadcast! Thanks.

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