An Almost Grown-Up Christmas

As a child Christmas is very me, me, me but I am now 23 and, as my mother keeps telling me, this means I don't get the same amount of surprises as the little ones. Now I'm not bothered about amounts, I'm a quality over quantity kind of girl, but sadly Christmas usually means useless presents so this year I took charge and kindly requested a whole host of gifts from her. I was very clear, all I really wanted was some pyjama's, anything else would be a bonus, but I had listed a variety so that I wouldn't know what was coming. I thought this was a cunning plan and somehow, magically, even those who didn't have access to the gift gave me wonderfully thoughtful presents.

Some of my favourite presents, including a beautiful long chained gold bird necklace, a hand knitted headband 
and an Apple Magic Mouse to stop me getting RSI with my incessant trackpad use.

I loved spending time with my friends on our traditional Christmas Eve pub crawl, plus my family and my boyfriend. This is his first year out of university (he did Dentistry which is a 5 year course) and he didn't love his short 4 day break (that's very short when you're used to 2/3 weeks) but we crammed in seeing both of our families and the constant moving around felt very adult. Suddenly we weren't just sat in front of the television eating chocolate, we were in the car moving around and he was entertaining my five year old brother playing Halo on the XBox and competing over the noise of my family all talking at once. Seriously impressive if you take into account the fact my boyfriend is an only child who is not used to having lots of children around and my brother argues with everyone he plays with and even shoots those on his team.

I put a lot more effort into my presents this year, making sure they were thoughtful and putting time into it with my DIY Christmas gifts. Unfortunately I was poorly before Christmas so I had to rush all my baking in the last 2 days and forget to take pictures...now all I have is the nearly empty box I gave to my dad with it's sad little bow starting to fray. I decorated each sweet box individually with blue, silver and purple ribbons, plus a handwritten contents tag. Each included small pieces of peanut butter fudge, chocolate hazelnut truffles piped with my own fair hands (yes, ok, so my dad thought they looked like dog poo but they really weren't that bad and tasted divine) and a treat bag with 3 or 4 pieces of differently shaped shortbread - stars, circles, "gingerbread" men and women or holly. Everyone seemed to love them, especially the fudge.

The rather lonely shortbread man left in my dads treat box

Astral's Peanut Butter Fudge and White Chocolate Vanilla Bean Truffles & Milk Chocolate Hazelnut Truffles 

(Nobody likes white chocolate in my family but me hence I just opted for the milk chocolate ones!)

Massive thanks go to Astral and her blog The Art of Being Perfect. Despite having a whole host of recipes I wanted to try this Christmas 2 out of the 3 recipes were found on her blog and it would have actually been all three if I hadn't been poorly and could have got the paste food colouring I needed to make the melted snowmen cookies.

Astral's Melted Snowman Cookies

A year ago I couldn't bake anything! I'm still not perfect but I am a LOT better than I used be and it was Astral that inspired me so I highly suggest you give them a go. So long as you don't mind yours looking a little more homemade you'll be fine.