First Post of the New Year

Happy New Year and our wishes for a wonderful 2024 to all of you.

This past couple of weeks have been absolutely packed for us.  We have celebrated two birthdays on top of  Christmas so we have really been hopping around here, with no real weaving time at all!  

The first birthday was Michael’s a few days prior to Christmas.  We went all out on the cake and made him an explosion of chocolate.  

This is a white chocolate and orange cake with dark chocolate ganache filling covered with milk chocolate Swiss meringue butter cream frosting.  It then has is chocolate feathers on the outside.  Needless to say, it was a big hit and thankfully we had friends to help eat it!

Then came Christmas morning and we made this lovely Star Bread for Christmas breakfast....just plain yummy.

Immediately after Christmas Ngaire’s birthday arrived and we jumped right back into the over the top cake bakes; we decided to make a Prinsesstårta.  Of course, since the cake wasn’t difficult enough we changed up a few things.  The cake itself was an orange chiffon cake, white chocolate puffed rice crunch layer, homemade dark cherry jam, vanilla pastry cream, vanilla creme diplomate, homemade marzipan with a homemade fondant rose.  It took virtually all day to make! 

It was pretty hard to cut, but tastes like a dream.

I have also been doing some knitting over the hols and I fell in love with the Alpine Bloom Hat by Caitlin Hunter.  I bought the pattern on Ravelry.

I knit the black and pink hat out of handspun merino and Ngaire was very happy with it, but I found the brim a bit too long for my liking.

I knit the same hat again with Rauma Garn (Norwegian wool) in a brighter pink and deep blue and I was much happier with the results with the fold under brim.