Post Christmas Wrap Up

I hope everyone had a wonderful Christmas and got to spend time with the people they love and eat fabulous food! My Christmas consisted of a 4hr road trip to D's parents place and a lovely Christmas lunch at his sisters new house. Our furry child Izzy came with us and enjoyed getting into the Christmas spirit also.

In the end I brought chocolate rum balls, chocolate gingerbread macarons, chocolate sugar cookies filled with chocolate ganache and sticky gingerbread with royal icing. Wow so much chocolate!

The rum balls I made using a basic rum ball recipe of:
1 packet milk arrow roots, crushed
1 tin condensed milk
1 cup coconut
1/2 cup cocoa
2 tbsp rum essence
And I added:
375g dark choc melts
All you have to do is place the chocolate in the food processor and pulse until crushed. Add to a bowl with milk arrow roots, condensed milk, coconut, cocoa and rum essence. Mix until combined. Roll into balls and roll in extra coconut. Store in the fridge but serve at room temperature as they tend to set quite hard.

For the macarons, I made the shells as per Candy Cane Macaron recipe. I left the mixture plain white but added stripes of green and red food gel colouring to the piping bag before filling with the macaron mix. The result was a wonderful candy cane looking macaron shell once piped and baked. I had seen this done at whiskitforabiscuit and was super impressed!

To make the chocolate gingerbread ganache, you will need:
1 1/2 cups chocolate melts
1/2 cup cream
2 tbsp golden syrup
1 tbsp ground ginger
1 tsp cloves
1 tsp mixed spice
All you need to do is heat the cream in a microwave for 1.5 minutes then pour over chocolate. Stir until smooth. Add the golden syrup, ginger, cloves and mixed spice. You may need to adjust the amounts of spices to suit your own tastes. Leave mixture to set to a thick consistency. Place in a piping bag and pipe onto half the macaron shells. Sandwich shells together. Store in the freezer and serve at room temperature.

Christmas is over now and we are back to life as per usual. I am trying to plan what the year ahead will have in store for Sugabuttacream and all I know for sure is it is going to be full of learning (baking, writing, photography etc) on my behalf and of course fabulous sugary sweetness!