Christmas 2009.

Here are some pictures from our Christmas this year.

This year, amazingly, I was extra organized, baking-wise, and stuck to the schedule I set for myself, which included lots of new recipes (as mentioned on the recipe list for December).

This picture is from the day before Christmas Eve, and I'm pouring out the peppermint chocolate rum cake, ready for marbling - which turned out to be the recipe Mark and I liked the least. I thought it was going to be Christmassy, and I tried to dye the chocolate part of the cake red, like red velvet cake, to go with the green-dyed peppermint part. But I don't think I used enough food coloring because it just looked a bit auburn. It was ok, and the marbling was well done, if I do say so myself, but the taste didn't really wow us. I don't know if that was me, or the recipe.





One thing that did work out well were the mini-pecan pies I made. I wanted an alternative to mince pies for me, since I don't eat raisins. This is from Christmas Eve day:


We drove to Brean and stayed overnight with Mark's mum on Christmas Eve. Sarah was back in town from Thailand.

On Christmas Day, Mark and I got up and went for a walk along the beach to Brean Down in the morning. You can see the hill in the distance:


You walk up a bunch of stairs and then at the top there's a nice view. Plus some remnants from an old Iron Age fort. Plus this thing, which reminds us of Aslan's table from The Lion, the Witch and the Wardrobe.



That's Weston-Super-Mare in the background. You can't really see our flat from here.


Then we had Christmas lunch. I contributed Julie's Kahlua sweet potatoes, cornbread dressing, and homemade cranberry sauce.






Later we played Ticket to Ride.



On Boxing Day, we walked up another hill, called Brent Knoll.



Then on the day after Boxing Day, we walked up Brean Down again, this time with Mark's family (they didn't come with us when we did it before), and we went all the way to the end, which we didn't have the time to do on Christmas Day.

The tide was all the way in and it was really windy and pretty cold.



On New Year's Day we did the last hill in our "Three Somerset Peaks" holiday challenge (there is an annual event here in the UK called the "Three Peaks Challenge" where teams of people compete in a race to walk up the three highest peaks in Great Britain - Ben Nevis in Scotland, Scafell Pike in England and Snowdon in Wales - all in one day). Mark has done it before, but they didn't win, though I don't think that was the point for them.

We had decided to do a Somerset-based (and much easier) version over the holiday period - Brean Down, Brent Knoll and Crook Peak, all of which are less than 15 minutes from our place. And they aren't peaks, just hills, though the views are still pretty good.

We walked up Crook Peak on New Year's Day with Mark's family. We didn't take the camera so we don't have an pictures. It was fun doing all three, though.