My, My...

It has been raining since Friday evening! Its been grey, windy and down right depressing whenever I look out the window... sigh. No wonder every time when its winter, there's bound to be some people doing crazy things like suicide etc; a mare boy shooting shoppers and killing himself....

Well to me it DOESN'T have to be depressing weather or mood wise. TO PEOPLE HAVING HISTORY OF DEPRESSION: GET HELP ASAP! We've been busy these past few weeks. I for one have been experimenting with recipes from a French baking mag I picked up while we were in France. The result, will never try their recipes any more!! The measurements (not to mention instructions!!) are a bit off and therefore, the sablé (French Butter biscuits) biscuits turn out to be less than OK, although edible... Then the chocolate "tongues" didn't look like any where near a tongue! Looks more like a splat flat porcupine!!! Seriously, its not that I had trouble understanding them. In fact I even had hubs translate them just so that I didn't get them wrong. May be I should try again the next time...

Fruit cakes... Yes it cracked a bit... Must be from the fact I tried to jam in as much dried fruit & nuts!!

There's a taboo from my mum saying that, if your baking didn't turn out well today, don't try to bake again until several days later; otherwise it'll turn out horrible as well! So better be safe than sorry, I made fruit cake the following weekend. You know the ones that has to go through the "aging" process? That's the one. Got the recipe from Joy of Baking site. Been brushing them twice a week and I really hope that it'll turn out well! Hubs: "Well babes, it does smell OK" is the reply I get whenever he wants a taste of it... Sorry babes. Its not old enough to be eaten yet! hahaha...

Our 1st tree ever!

Oh! Did I mentioned that we got a real pine tree? Its our 1st tree after all these years here. And since its impossible to get decorations for Chinese New Year (unless online), we thought why not decorate a Christmas tree instead although we don't celebrate Christmas. Besides, if I were to decorate for CNY, my ang mohs neighbours will be wondering if we opened up a Chinese restaurant instead of celebrating CNY!! LOL! So far, we've put up all trinkets and 1 of my stiched ornaments. I still have 3 more to go... sigh.

Some of the tree deco...

Just hung up 1 of my stitched ornaments...

The charts looks so simple and easy to do, but it took me longer to frog and to redo the whole thing. So for now there's no pictures of them yet. Will do once I finish them and hang them up on our tree. We didn't really managed to find ornaments that we wanted, so will have to make do with whatever I could get my hands on from our nearby super market. Will do better next year with hand made glass ornaments, for the moment its all plastic, clay and natural pine . I was also afraid that Owen will pull, play, bite and or swallow them as he's starting to learn to crawl and is grabbing anything he could get his hands on to "taste" them in his mouth! We're praying that he won't pull the whole tree down!!