Ok then, so I was all completely on track to make some of my signature flapjacks. What’s that? Yes, I know they’re not hugely exotic, but they are very, very nutritious. Yes, really. They’re full of oats, which as everyone knows lower cholesterol and provide sustained energy in a controlled fashion, unlike those naughty white flour snacks. I won’t mention the half-pound of butter if you don’t. Or the syrup. Obviously there is a sprinkling of sugar, too, but not that much. Not in the grand scheme of things.

Right, so there I was, poised on the edge of making the Anchor flapjacks. Well, if we must be strictly accurate, I was on the sofa, watching Above Suspicion (aka Shouty and Pouty) on catch-up, when Child Two called up from the kitchen. ‘Can I make some fairy cakes?’ Well, obviously, the answer to that in our house is always a resounding YES. So make them she did. With my Anchor butter. Specially bought for the flapjacks.

Oh deary me. On the plus side, we now have a delectable tin full of yummy fairy cakes, in two flavours, almond and lemon, with matching icing. Nommy nom nom. On the, ahem, minus side, we have no flapjacks. But do not despair. I’m going to give you the recipes for both, then you can decide which works out better for your own personal elevenses moment.

Child Two’s Fairy Cakes

Set oven to 170 C

Put paper or silicone cases into two fairy cake tins

Ingredients

250g Anchor butter

250g caster sugar

4 eggs

vanilla essence

250g self raising flour

almond essence

100g ground almonds

juice and pith of a lemon

Icing: icing sugar, lemon juice, almond essence

Method.

Cream butter and sugar until pale and fluffy. Add eggs one at a time. Add vanilla essence. Sieve in flour, then beat. Divide mixture into two bowls. Add half lemon juice and pith to one bowl, and almond essence and ground almonds to the other. Mix well. Put into paper cases with a teaspoon. Bake for 20-25 minutes.

When cool, make glace icing in two bowls, one with the other half of the lemon juice and pith, the other with more almond essence. Drizzle over cakes and enjoy!

DD’s Flapjacks

Set oven to 180 C, put greaseproof paper in a lasagne dish or baking tin

Ingredients

250g Anchor butter

450g oats – from cereal aisle at supermarket. If you can’t find them, then an oat-heavy muesli works really well.

200g sugar (any type works)

2-3 tablespoons golden syrup

Optional extras (try one at a time until you find your family’s favourite)

Half teaspoon cinnamon or allspice

100g chopped hazlenuts

100g raisins

Method.

Microwave or heat butter in a large bowl/pan until melted. Add the oats, sugar and syrup and any ingredients you fancy from the optional list. Cook for twenty minutes and try not to eat it all before everyone gets home.

What I hadn’t realised is that this time, we’d be making all the bits ourselves. From scratch! Yes, creating our own gingerbread walls, ceiling, doors and windows. And then decorating! Phew.

Our kit arrived in a lovely red box

I was a bit daunted as I lifted the ingredients out of the lovely red box Tesco had sent. But luckily my intrepid team of cooks were not fazed for one second. There were, in fact, squeals of delight as they unearthed a haul of sweeties including licquorice allsorts, strawberry laces, dolly mixtures, marshmallows and icing pens. Of course, they didn’t think for even one nanosecond about the condition of the table, walls, floor and even ceiling during and after the creation. But there we are. That’s the price of true artistry, I suppose.

Melting the sugar, butter, treacle and syrup

For all my moaning, the house was surprisingly easy to bake. The gingerbread recipe is quick and, though it seemed perilously crumbly when we were rolling it out, adding virtually half a kilo of sugar icing meant that it set like concrete. You do, however, have to leave the cooked pieces overnight in a tin to dry out enough to use, otherwise they would buckle. *Worth explaining to the kids from the start, so there’s no disappointment at not finishing the job all in one go*.

Cutting out the gingerbread house

There was one tiny, eeency-wincy little problem, when we came to the construction part, though – we forgot to cut out two of the roof shapes, so our gingerbread house has a flat roof. Well, it’s so loaded with white chocolate buttons, you can hardly see it. And the gables soaring above it look very fine and rather spectacular. They even have stained glass windows, glazed with melted rhubarb and custard boiled sweets, and etched into heart shapes while still soft by my own fair hand.

Rhubarb and custard sweets will melt to become stained glass windows

Inside the house, there’s not a whole lot of room for the gingerbread people, because instead of a bowl to steady the walls during construction, we put in two coffee cups, forgot to take them out, and iced the roof over them. Ahem. Oh well. At some point over Christmas we’ll have to go on a rescue mission and chop our way through to the abandoned cups. Up until then, we shall just bask in the splendour of the house, and the warm glow of accomplishment which comes from making the whole thing ourselves. Thank you, Tesco Real Food. If you want to see how to do it in a tidier, less sticky fashion, have a look at http://www.tescorealfood.com/recipes/how-to-build-a-gingerbread-house.html.

And, if you’re in the middle of making it when you discover part of the roof is missing, *cough*, you can tweet Tesco Real Food’s special team of crack Christmas cooking experts, who will be helping people live over Christmas. Just tweet @TescoRealFood, or http://twitter.com/tescorealfood. And good luck!

Ta-da, our flat-roofed gingerbread house is all finished!

I must admit that, as the winter approaches, I think about my health a lot more. That’s partly because I live in a house festooned with piles of tissues, as TL has had a cold, Child Two is working on developing a cold, and I have an unspecified allergy which is officially blamed on the enormous plane tree outside the house, but which I suspect really stems from our two lovely cats. The sound of sniffing, hacking, wheezing and even the odd bit of whining (from me, naturally) is the soundtrack to my life at the moment.

Given our snuffle-ridden state, it seems like a very good moment to mention Bupa’s clever new health insurance scheme, Bupa By You, which I’ve been asked to bring to your attention. It’s rather nifty as you can tailor it to your specific requirements and adapt it to fit your budget.

Niftier still, Bupa is inviting everybody to make their own special Bupa video ads, showing what healthiness means to you. For example, if your idea of perfect healthiness is doing a cross-country run, going to the gym and finishing off with an hour of Zumba, get a friend to film you going through your paces and, when you’ve got your breath back, upload it to the Bupa site. Alternatively, if your view of true health involves adding a banana to your usual stack of chocs in front of the telly, then go for it (though as a little tip, I don’t think the second one will win. Pity). Of course, humour, an unusual sport or hobby or just sheer cinematic brilliance will really help you to win the prize. And what a prize – the best ad will be shown on national telly, and the winner will receive a MacBook Air, with two runners-up getting Flip HD pocket camcorders.

If your child is a budding film maker, or if you’ve always fancied yourself as an auteur but never had an outlet, do give it a go. After all, someone’s got to win. And, as I reach for another choc slice of banana, I’m not sure it’s going to be me.

Then there’s the last posting date, the delivery dates which the postman unaccountably misses, the expiry date on the Christmas pudding (why is it always 24th December?) …..

And, of course, there are actual date dates. It’s the party season, so it’s mandatory to turn up with someone living and breathing to the office Christmas party, unless you want to get cornered next to the photocopier by the creepy guy from Despatch, or, even worse, your boss, allowed out alone for one day a year.

Luckily, it seems as easy as pie to rustle up a date these days, even if you’re a single parent living in the women-only world which revolves around small children. I remember years ago being introduced to a couple and a friend whispering, ‘they met through a dating agency,’ and us both looking at the pair as though they had not just two, but possibly fourteen, heads. It was considered really, really odd way back then. Now, of course, everyone is out there online dating. When a friend’s second marriage broke up, he was posted on a dating site before he’d collected his clothes from the front lawn outside his soon-to-be ex-wife’s house. There are even specific parent dating sites, so you don’t have to go through that tricky moment of revelation when you come clean about having children, and worry that the other person is going to make their excuses and leave (that did actually happen to another friend. Good riddance, we all said).

Obviously stick to the safe dating rules – always meet in a public place, never give out your home address, make sure a friend knows where you are, and most important, run if you don’t like the look of them. Ooops, no, not that one – it’s rude. But be careful. And happy hunting. Who knows, you may find someone to stand under the mistletoe with this Christmas.

In fact, the lady in charge of handbags even asked me if I’d like to borrow the Mulberry Daria (my favourite by a mile, TL I hope you are reading this and remember that it’s Christmas in ONE MONTH) and walk around the shop with it. Thank goodness I had enough – just enough – willpower to resist this delicious suggestion. Or I’d still have the handbag with me now, and we’d be looking at an interesting festive season featuring Dairylea sandwiches and second-hand Barbie annuals from the Save the Children shop instead of turkey and presents. Nothing wrong with either of these two options, of course, but maybe not what two acquisitive teens and two deserving tots have put on their lists to Santa ….

Anyway, the Mulberry bags are selling like very surprising hot cakes. ‘We’ve had our best week ever with Mulberry. People are either saving up and going high-end premium, or they’re going for the value end of our range,’ I was told. It was a similar story in shoes, where the Kurt Geigers are still prancing out of the shop, along with own brand shoes, leaving middle ranges kicking their heels. ‘Instead of getting the dress, bag and shoes, people are just buying the shoes to glam up an outfit,’ I was told.

Meanwhile Cashmere Mary, the queen bee of the cashmere department, is presiding over a diminishing domain as shoppers start to rifle her stock of jewel-coloured jumpers at only £69 for the crew and V necklines, £75 for the cardigan, £125 for very tempting stripy waterfall numbers. I ask Mary a couple of questions about cashmere maintenance, which I am afraid underline the fact that I am not very good at it. ‘All cashmere gets bobbles. You just have to watch out for handbag straps rubbing,’ she tells me with a no-nonsense glance at the villain of the piece, my enormous cluttered handbag (it’s not a Mulberry, TL … but it could be ….). ‘You can also get a special debobbling machine from the haberdashery department downstairs. And moths? Well, of course you have to store your jumpers in a sealed bag. Any old plastic bag will do. Just pop them in every night and no moths will get anywhere near them,’ she says reassuringly. Unless there’s a moth already in the bag, I venture. ‘Well, I have cashmere in every colour of the rainbow, all in bags, and I’ve never had a bag with a moth in it,’ she tells me. I don’t think any moth would dare.

Off we go to the toy department, where I am agog to see what will go into the nation’s stockings. It’s actually very useful for me as my two are now sadly into the adult joys of iPods and boots, leaving me a bit adrift for ideas for TL’s smallies. Well, it turns out that this year Santa will be struggling to stuff a whole load of scooters down chimneys, with the ones which can go right up to age 11 being most popular. Otherwise, there’s the usual Lego sets, with Ninjago and speedboats zooming ahead. For girls, there are various ghastly animatronic pets and, cutest of the cute, a new Sylvanian Families shop – and not just any shop, but a John Lewis. At £80, it’s quite pricey, but it’s utterly irresistible too. Maybe I’ll have to elbow the Mulberry bag off my wishlist and go for my very own branch of John Lewis to play with instead ….

Part of my problem is that most of my relatives live abroad. Out of sight, not out of mind, but still a bit less ever-present than other people’s, maybe. Certainly they’re not popping round every five minutes saying, ‘what on earth are you getting me this year? Hope it’s better than last year.’ And that’s what I need. Constant reminders. Before that tinsel-encrusted shark bites me.

I did get a memory-jog the other day, when someone mentioned they’d been sent a bouquet for their birthday. Now that is a brilliant idea for relatives abroad. It’s something a little bit different – certainly different from the Amazon vouchers I will be panic-buying on Christmas Day if I don’t get my skates on – which shows you’ve given the matter a bit of thought. It’s quite easy to get flowers direct these days, and they don’t have to be those half-hearted bouquets of pastel carnations you used to get. I’ve just had a quick look and seen mini Christmas trees, lovely festive centrepieces, even plants if you don’t want to give something as fleeting as flowers. Champagne and chocs can be winged around the world, too. And, if you’re looking specifically for gifts for her, you can get anything from bubble bath to personalised cupcakes.

Not that I’m hinting or anything. Because I would never do that. You know me. And besides, I’m much too busy trying to avoid that glittery Christmas shark ……

Still, we’ve had a good run for our money. Though not literally, that would be far too sweaty. But we’ve had a lot of bloggy fun during the holiday.

So far, we’ve acquired a fabulous Philips Airfryer, and thoroughly put it through its paces. I must admit that, when the kind Philips folk rang up and asked if we’d like to have one of these lovely new thingamies, I thought it would be the size of an ordinary frying pan. Not so. It is about the girth of a young Dalek, and sits, squat and a bit forbidding, on the kitchen counter. Now as you know, I have a bit of a thing about appliances. I like them to be stuck in cupboards. So far I’ve put tellies in cupboards, stereos in cupboards, the microwave in a cupboard and, rather triumphantly, the bread machine into a cupboard. So every time I look at the airfryer, I think ‘cupboard’. Particularly as it is black, a colour I am not at all keen on. But that is my only quibble. The fryer itself is absolutely brilliant, which is really the whole point after all.

We are not a great family of fryers. My mother would occasionally, very occasionally, get out a mysterious black pan, full to the brim with oil, when she made chips. The whole thing was laborious, and fraught with danger. If the pan caught fire, we would all be in big, big trouble and the world would almost certainly come to an end. With this lurking in my memory, and with the health implications of frying in mind too, I’ve always tended to grill rather than fry.

The airfryer, though, is a closed unit, so no danger of the universe going up in flames. And it uses hardly any oil, amazingly. Half a tablespoon is enough when cooking enough chips for a family of four – yes, really – and they come out delicious.

So far, we’ve done the chips twice, with two different thicknesses, and I’ve also made chicken nuggets, with some breadcrumbs provided by Philips but jazzed up with my own combination of chopped coriander, Dijon mustard, a bit of paprika and some lemon pith. No fat at all, not one drop. Move over Colonel Sanders.

I’m looking forward to trying out fishcakes, and there are also recipes for all sorts of unlikely things, like brownies and cakes, which we’ll have a go at. It’s very easy to clean, with non-stick surfaces, and to use, with a simple timer on the front and a temperature gauge. Couldn’t be less scary, and it produces great results. We’re supposed to be scoring my culinary efforts and probably taking pictures of everything, but so far I’ve failed to have a camera on hand at any of the crucial moments – black mark there. I did ask for scores out of ten last night and was awarded 101 and 910, and you can’t say fairer than that, can you?

As well as all the exciting stuff coming out of the kitchen, our smallies were invited to Build-A-Bear Workshop to make their first ever bears. A proud moment. We arrived to find a bit of a hoo-ha as the stuffing machine had broken. Build-A-Bear devotees will know that the revolving drum of stuffing is an integral part of the bear creation process, and I felt very sorry for the staff as they had three large parties booked over the day. They were absolutely gorgeous with the small folk though, showing not a trace of panic or rush, and helped them create two very fantastic bears, Tabby, who is actually a cat and is wearing very natty high heels, and Bear, who has fetching camouflage markings and is wearing a Spiderman outfit. As you do. This year, as usual, Build-A-Bear is helping the BBC’s Children in Need, with its own Pudsey bear. Every Pudsey sold will add £5 to the Children in Need total. Pudsey also has a range of clothes, slippers, bits, bobs and fripperies which also contribute to the charity. TL was a bit taken aback by the oath of eternal fealty the children had to swear to their bears,but I pointed out that it was no bad thing that the smalls had agreed to take good care of their bears and, so far, they have stuck by their words.

The book’s heroine, Becky, is a rampant spender, who literally starts to twitch when she passes an outlet store. She has to shop, and she is quite random in her choices. It’s led me to think a little more carefully about what I shell out for, and when. Is it, as in the book, when I am under stress that I head for a shop? And am I buying things I’ll never wear, as Becky does, just for the satisfaction of having yet another carrier bag trophy to rustle?

One of the ideas I did like was Becky’s pocket-money notebook for her little daughter. Ok, so Minnie is 2, and yeah, so Becky has spent Minnie’s pocket money for her right up until the year 2103, but the principle is sound. It is good to get children to manage their own money, as best they can. We had an interesting moment the other day, when one of my girls was desperate for a pair of shoes – the type of shoes you wear once and which either fall apart, cripple your feet, or go instantly out of fashion. ‘I’m not keen on buying those for you. But I don’t mind if you get them with your own pocket money,’ I said. Suddenly the shoes didn’t seem quite as essential to the continuance of my daughter’s life as they had been minutes earlier, when it was my money on the line.

In a way, it’s not a brilliant time to save, as interest rates are so low (gosh, how do I even know these things? But actually, it’s true. Interest rates are at an historic low). On the other hand, it’s never been a worse time to spend, as almost every household in the country has less coming in than this time last year. I’m definitely not going to splash the cash this winter, and I’m even going to stash if I can. Who knows, I might even start savings accounts for my girls. I’m sure Becky would love the idea.

I have a family ticket for the London Dungeon to give away. It’s for two adults and two children, and should scare your little ones so much they’ll be delighted to go back to school! What could be better? Just drop me a comment and they’re yours.

Also, I have been nominated for this year’s Gurgle awards! In the best writer category!! Obviously I am very excited, especially as the other writers are all great blogs that I absolutely love. I was very surprised to be included. If you have a moment and are feeling kind, do pop over and vote for me here. Wow, that is shameless – but if you don’t ask ….

And while I am puffing away at my trumpet, how about having a look at the Tesco Real Food Blog? Yes, it’s little me with a recipe for ice cream. It’s absolutely foolproof (well, look at the fool who invented it!) and delicious too ….

I’ve always had a soft spot for alpaca. It’s my firm belief that an alpaca jumper saved my life at university. I was at St Andrews, dangling on the edge of Scotland, in a setting which could not have been more beautiful. I took a daily constitutional by the sea. I admired the ruined cathedral. I adored the countryside. I even occasionally did some work. But most of the time, I froze. St Andrews was lashed constantly by rain, wind, even bits of driftwood on a bad day. It was only my alpaca (bought for a song in the local woollen mill) which kept me from hypothermia. Imagine my joy, then, to learn that Honda‘s latest indents for Channel 4 documentaries will feature a little film all about alpacas.

The first of a series devoted to quirky Honda-lovers, it follows the life and work of Philippa, an alpaca breeder, who tends to her flock on her trusty Honda. If you have a Honda and a quirk, you might well feel moved to participate yourself. If you pop along to the Honda site, www.honda.co.uk/stories, you can upload your own stories and photographs. These will be sifted through by top Honda honchos and the winning entry will be turned into a mini-documentary. Go on, enter – you could find yourself starring in between outings of Channel 4 documentaries. Definitely worth a go. Meanwhile, I’m going to be searching for that old alpaca jumper. Where on earth did I put it? It’s just the thing for this less-than-splendid summer.

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