I'm doing a roast chicken and veg for our friends tonight. I hardly ever do roasts, because of the chopping of vegetables involved, so I'm looking forward to this one. I have parsnips, carrots, and purple sprouting broccoli, as well as challottes and lots of garlic to stuff the chicken with. Hopefully D will do his mashed potatoes, and that should be enough I think.

I've been most housewify theses last two days. Shopping and tidying yesterday. A lot of hoovering, cleaning and cooking today. I have prepared a Raspberry and White Chocolate Trifle for dessert:


It's delicious, and very easy to make:

Ingredients:
Sponge fingers
Brandy or other dessert liquor (I used Madeira because that's what we had in the house)
one 500g carton of custard
1 pack of cream cheese
aprox. 300g whipping cream, whipped
150g bar of white chocolate, melted
50g sugar
as many raspberries as you want (I used two packets)

Divide the custard into two bowls. In one bowl, mix custard, 1/2 of the sugar and the cream cheese. In the other bowl, mix custard with the rest of the sugar and all of the melted white chocolate. Then carefully mix about half of the cream under.

Pile the sponge fingers into a bowl and soak them with as much of the alcohol as you see fit. Arrange most of the raspberries on top, just keeping a few back to decorate the top of the trifle later on, then pour the cream cheese mix on top. Level out and add the chocolate mix on top of that. Level out and finish off with a layer of the left-over cream. Decorate with raspberries and chill for a few hours.

Finis!

I also managed to make some cupcakes, using Nikki Shell's recipe, which was incredibly quick and easy. Here they are, modelled together with my Greek pullover sleeve - not that you can see any more than a black blob of that, but at least the cupcakes are photogenic!


And last but not least, here is the first picture of the Falling Leaves sock for the Socktoberfest. Finally!!

Still a long way to go, but as I can see the pattern emerging it's fun. :)