The best Bond... so far

I had a little poll on my blog to see which James Bond we all prefer. Daniel Craig won by miles, giving me an excuse for a nice gratuitous non-festive picture. Nobody voted for Roger Moore, which says a great deal about those awful films where a flabby Bond pawed at nubile bikini-clad Bond girls. Nowadays Bond is the objectified one and is expected to be a little more buff while the Bond girls are intelligent, but still beautiful. Don't you just love the 21st century!

It's Christmas!

I had two 'rules' for the tree this year. 1. Only gold, white and clear decorations. 2. No tinsel. Hannah and Rosie did the decorating and a few non-rules things have sneaked on (like the red crackers), but I think they did a great job and they were very proud of it when they had finished.

One of the non-white/gold/clear decorations is this pretty angel which belongs to Hannah. But she's so gorgeous I allowed her to stay.

This is the nativity Hannah made at school a couple of years ago. It owes a great deal to egg boxes and toilet roll middles. Rosie made the angel on the far left and the other angel is a bamboo one they fell in love with in a shop in Solva when they were babies.

This is the dining room window tree - a goat willow branch planted in a pot with all our homemade decorations and a few fairies on board. Half of the lights are out (as usual!). I need a bumper pack of spare bulbs for this set.

Pony cakes

Okay. By popular demand (well, two people have asked!) here are my pony cakes, last year's and this year's. Not great works of art, admittedly, but made with love more than any particular artistic flair.

Technical notes. Both were made from an eight inch chocolate sponge cake. This year's had added ground almonds, because I felt like it (3 eggs, weigh eggs, same weight of each of very soft butter, caster sugar and self raising flour. Remove three tablespoonfuls of flour and replace with one tablespoon of cocoa powder and two tablespoons of ground almonds).

Last year's icing was ordinary chocolate butter icing, following the recipe on the icing sugar packet. This year's was Brian's chocolate spice cake icing, which is delicious. He had to make it because the recipe is top secret and I'm not allowed to have it. It can only be passed on to a bloodline C., so H6 and R5 will get the recipe one day. Huh.

The mane, carrots, apple etc are coloured marzipan, because we all love marzipan and hate sugar paste.

That's it really. The recipient was delighted. We all made absolute pigs of ourselves eating it (is there anything better than chocolate icing?) and we argued over who got the biggest carrot.

Will R5 want another pony cake for her 6th birthday? I have a horrible feeling that she will!