In My Kitchen: December

Welcome to the first Saturday of the month where I share everything I have made over the previous month. Like the last few months, motivation has been hard to come by when it comes to baking!

I haven't really been baking much and then I decided that I needed to make some Christmas biscuits but couldn't decide what to make. In the end, I made four different types! The first two were a classic shortbread and then a pistachio, sour cherry and white chocolate version. These are both made from the same base recipe. Shortbread is one of my husband's favourite and I have made these before using the recipe from Emelia Jackson's second book Some of My Best Friends are Cookies. 

The other two recipes came from Advent by Anja Dunk. The first recipe was one that I made last year and was Chocolate Meringue Kisses. The new recipe that I tried was Weihnachtsroschen or Christmas Swirls. These are meant to be neat circles which you then put a dollop of jam into the centre. When I made the dough, I did try to pipe it into circles but the dough was way too stiff to pipe so I ended up just rolling it into balls and then putting a thumbprint into the dough and adding the jam. The dough was really fun to play with as it had a lovely feel.

For breakfast on Christmas day we had pancakes with berries and cream. That meant that we had a ton of berries left over, so I decided to make a relatively simple no bake cheesecake which is vanilla with a ginger nut biscuit base. It is one that I have made and shared the recipe before. What I didn't do is take a picture! Oh well. I will have to make it again at some point.

Christmas for us is very traditional. Robert and I started on Christmas Eve with a heap of prawns (pictured above). We then had the pancakes for breakfast and then went to lunch at my sisters. We always have a very traditional lunch, no matter the weather. Fortunately, it was quite cool this year so it was perfect for a hot lunch. We started with Prawn Cocktail, and then the main course of roast turkey and vegetables, ham and bread rolls. For dessert, there was a selection (shown above) but the centrepiece is always the homemade plum pudding that my sister makes which is then set on fire just before serving it!

Speaking of Christmas, I did quite well in the foodie Christmas gifts department. I was given new kitchen scales, Everybody Love Cake by Alisha Henderson and a baking mat (not pictured)  and I got the pet treat maker and Christmas baking kit when we played Naughty Santa. If you don't know what that is, basically you take turns to open presents but then someone else can either choose to open a present or they can choose to steal your present and then you get to choose to open or steal! 

At the front you can see new kitchen scales. This was a welcome gift as the ones I have been using for years were starting to play up. When you turned it on and pressed the button to make it get to 0, you had to wait as it slowly went into the negative. It usually ended up at around -15g, so if you wanted 100g you would have to do the maths and say if I want 100g then I need the scales to say 85g! I am looking forward to not having to do maths when cooking!

We have been talking about buying a drinks fridge to put in the garage. We had decided that we were going to wait for the Boxing Day sales to buy one, but then someone put one up on our community Facebook page for $50 so we snapped that up instead. Fortunately, it seems to work fine

I mentioned last month that we love a free glass and this month we picked up 6 champagne glasses. One of our supermarket chains, regularly has promotions where you get points for shopping with them, and then you can exchange those points for whatever the promotional items are. Currently, they are giving away European glassware. Given that this supermarket is where we do most of our shopping, it doesn't take too long to accumulate enough points. We got 6 glasses and I think we probably still have enough points to get more glasses. We'll see.

52 Recipes Challenge

A tthe beginning of the year I declared that we were going to try 52 new recipes in the year. I mean, that's only one new recipe a week which feels doable. It turns out it was not! To be fair, at the end of June we were on track but since then we have tried very few new recipes, so we only ended up trying 38 new recipes for the year.

I don't think that we will be doing this challenge again this year!

Here are the new recipes we tried this month.

Pork Schnitzel

Crumpets

Weekly Meals

Saturday - Pork chops, baked potatoes and coleslaw
Sunday - Roast chicken, potatos
Monday - Chicken Shwarma
Tuesday - Smash Burgers
Wednesday - Out for dinner
Thursday - Steak, mash potato and broccoli
Friday -

Weekend Cooking posts from the last month

Best of 2025

Afternoon Tea Diaries: Palate Through Time: Before at Oxi Tea Rooms

Christmas at Hollybush Farm by Jo Thomas

In My Kitchen: November

I am sharing this post with In My Kitchen hosted at Sherry's Pickings.

Weekend Cooking is open to anyone who has any kind of food-related post to share: Book reviews (novel, nonfiction), cookbook reviews, movie reviews, recipes, random thoughts, gadgets, quotations, photographs, restaurant reviews, travel information, or fun food facts. If your post is even vaguely foodie, feel free to grab the button and link up anytime over the weekend. You do not have to post on the weekend. Please link to your specific post, not your blog's home page