food as gifts

Every month or so I lunch with a bunch of authors in the city. They come from all around Melbourne, countryside included, and we've been doing it for years. When I was a newbie author, and just joined the group, there were five of us. Now there are sixteen.

The only time all sixteen of us come, however, is the end of year Xmas lunch, so it's always an event, with lots of talking as we catch up on everyone's news.  We have a Kris Kringle, too, and the rule is a gift costing about $10. We used to make it something edible and home made, but now it's expanded to include something writing related or edible —home made or bought.

I like to try out different things each year, and this year decided on beautifully decorated gingerbread cookies. (Have you spotted the flaw in my plan yet? No? Read on.) This is the kind of thing I had in mind.

I searched out a recipe that looked promising, mixed it up, chilled it, rolled it out and cut out dozens of beautiful little cookies in the shapes of different kinds of stars, hearts and also gingerbread people.  The house smelled magical as they were baking and they came out perfectly.

Next step, decorating them. The first problem came when I found that my old piping bag had disappeared. All the other pieces were there, not the bag. So I tried using a plastic bag and a piping nozzle. Splat. Giant icing blobs attack gingerbread man.

No problem, I thought. I'll make my own icing bag from cut out circles of baking paper. I've seen TV chefs use them all the time. So I cut out a circle of baking paper, formed it into a cone, filled it with the icing mixture and snipped off the tip.
Splat! Dribble! Blob! Squelch!

I tried half a dozen and decided there was no way I could give this as a gift. Yes, they'd taste lovely -- if you like gingerbread and some people don't -- but they looked terrible.

So... thinking cap back on. Some years back my local organic greengrocer used to sell cocoa dusted almonds that were simply delicious. The grocer moved away and the shop is now an art gallery, but maybe I could make the almonds myself. I prowled through various recipes on the internet and found spice dusted recipes, but no cocoa. But the principle would be the same, I thought, so I tried it.

Dead easy. Whip up an egg-white, and mix in spices, some sugar  and cocoa, then coat the nuts in the mix and roast them. Again the house was redolent with the scent of roasting nuts and spices — I decided on spiced cocoa nuts. I have to say,  they turned out beautifully. They were delicious -- not too spicy, and not too cocoa-ey (mainly because I'd only had a little cocoa left in the packet and couldn't be bothered driving to the 24 hour supermarket - it was getting pretty late.)

But then the more I looked at them, the more I thought it was a pretty average KK gift -- a jar of nuts. So I fell back on my last year's KK  and made mendiants. These are so simple, yet yummy. A blob of melted chocolate, and on it a collection of nuts and dried fruit. I used spiced cocoa almonds, macadamia nuts, pistachios, candied ginger and dried figs, and the chocolate was Lindt dark chocolate. This is the label I made to go with them - because traditional French confections with monkish connections are so much better than a blob of chocolate with nuts and dried fruit on it, aren't they?

Mendiants are traditional French confections composed of  chocolate disks studded with nuts and died fruits. Traditionally, the nuts and dried fruits used refer to the color of monastic robes — raisins for the Dominicans, hazelnut for the Augustins, dried fig for Franciscans and almond for Carmelites. Now a Christmas tradition,  recipes for this confection have embraced other combinations of toppings.

So that was my KK — a jar of spiced nuts and a box of mendiants.  I'd make both of them again, too, in fact I'm planning on making some more of the nuts a bit closer to Christmas. I've already given the first batch away.

And on my list for Xmas? A piping bag. And maybe some lessons in how to use it. :)

Quick, fun Halloween craft

We don't really do Halloween downunder. My first ever sight of a carved pumpkin Jack O'Lantern was in Scotland when we lived there for a year when I was a kid. I loved them, longed for one, even butchered a hapless pumpkin in my 8 year old fervour for one. A desperate failure, I suspect and I've never had one since.

The country where they really go all out for Halloween activities is the USA. And influenced by US TV,  the kids here are starting to pick it up. What's not to like about dressing up, scaring people and the legalized taking of sweets from strangers? The only problem is that when the local kids go trick-or-treating and knock on doors, they often get blank looks. Or a diatribe about it not being our tradition and watching too much American TV.

A couple of years ago I was heading off to the supermarket and I saw a small gang of kidlets down the end of my street dressed as ghosts and ghouls and pumpkins, clearly going trick-or-treating, and though I kind of agree with the "not-our-tradition" folks, it's a bit of fun for kids, and these kids had gone to a lot of trouble and looked really cute,  so I bought some chocolates and lollies for when they got to my house.

I was only gone half an hour, and it was still light when I got home, but my door got nary a knock.
So there I was with a small pile of the sort of stuff I try not to buy or bring into the house. What to do with it all? Oh, the dilemma!

Anyway, since I enjoy crafts, and in my neck of the woods we're in for a long, wet weekend, I thought I'd share a few easy, kid-friendly halloween crafts. They're all in paper, so cheap, fun and easy is the theme.

 If you have any littlies who want masks, there are some good, simple ones here.

You might want to make a lovely Halloween decoration — collect a bunch of interesting twigs, spray paint them black and hang the paper decorations below from them. Easy, gorgeous and cheap.

The decorations below are printable and downloadable free from the craft ideas site. There are lots more good ideas on this site.

Here's a downloadable paper origami cat that comes in black or marmalade — just print it off, cut fold and glue — dead easy. (pun intended, heh heh) I've made these and I really like them. Tammy Yee, the designer, has other animals that are print and cut out, too, including bats, and some really beautiful owls.

The hanging paper pumpkins below are both elegant and amazingly easy. All you need is orange and green paper, scissors and glue or a stapler and some cotton to hang them. They're a variation on some Christmas deco designs I've made before, and it's all about strips of paper that are different lengths.
A different, just as easy and elegant design is here.

So whether you celebrate Halloween or not, enjoy the evening and don't scare the kids too much. 

Farewell Eva Ibbotson

Eva Ibbotson— one of my favorite writers in all the world — died on Wednesday and I'm feeling very sad. 


Many people know and love her children's books — Which Witch, The Secret of Platform 13, The Journey to the River Sea and many more, but I first came to Eva Ibbotson through her adult romances. They were well out of print when I discovered them, but I hunted them down on the internet until I had a full collection. I didn't care that I'd paid quite a bit of money for battered old library editions; the contents were gold.

However last year they were reissued— as YA books for some odd reason — and it was great because the books found a whole new audience, and also because I was able to press her books on friends without risking their non-return.  I did a Word Wench interview with Eva last year, when she was 84.


She left behind her a brilliant legacy — these are books that will live on, as Georgette Heyer's books have lived on, but one of  her stories that might not live on is a small piece she wrote in support of public libraries, and it's one of my favorites. 
It starts:

I was eight years old when I came to Britain as a refugee - and was not particularly grateful. Mostly this was because after years and years of being a sheep coming to the manger, or a grazing cow, I had at last landed the part of the Virgin Mary in the nativity play at my convent school in Vienna.

And then ... Hitler.      read the rest here.

You can listen to a podcast interview with Eva here.


Eva said once in an interview  that she thought of her books as a present for readers.
They are indeed a gift she has left to the world.
Vale Eva Ibbotson.

The Delicate Art of Critique

I'm blogging on RomanceAustralia about the critiquing process — what to talk about when you're past the beginner stage. Any suggestions?

The hardest part of the critique process comes after the beginner level is past. Often people are at a loss when they read someone’s work, especially if problems are few and far between. What if there are no typos, no grammar mistakes, no head hopping, no obvious problems? Where do you go then?


I think one of the most important things is to respond to a piece, not correct it.  

Read the rest of the post here.

Where my ideas come from...

I'm celebrating the release of my book THE ACCIDENTAL WEDDING and blogging on WordWenches today about what is probably the most common question an author gets asked - Where do you get your ideas?

When an author first gets published, people who don't know her — and sometimes people who do — assume that if the events and characters from her books don't come from history books, they must come from her life.

I can't speak for other authors, but for me, this is far from the truth. Not one character I've ever written has ever existed outside my imagination. And my life hasn't been nearly as exciting or adventurous as that lived by most of my heroines. And, alas, the heroes that walk my pages are not hanging around my house. Even the occasional dog that appears in a book wasn't one of my dogs. Really, I often just dream up scenes and stories and I have no idea where that comes from — I only know it's not from history books and it's not from my life. 

What I do often take from life, however, are the small details that "furnish" the book, the things, for instance that evoke a scene and a mood. The scent of herbs drying or bread baking, of new cut grass, or of damp dog. The fragrance of a wood fire, the crackle and hiss of burning wood, the settling of coals and the dancing of shadows on the walls when the only light is firelight.  

Read the rest of the post here...

Dorothea Brande and me

Today I'm a guest on Joanna Bourne's wonderful blog, where I'm talking about my version of Dorothea Brande.

Dorothea Brande was a writer and writing teacher in New York in the 1930's. She wrote a book called Becoming a Writer which is now a classic and is still in print. It was the forerunner to books like Julia Cameron's "The Artist's Way" and others.

But Dorothea isn't the slightest bit new-agey.  Her book is small and slender, her advice practical and quite pithy.  The writing style is spare, elegant, and a little old-fashioned in places. Dorothea is as romantic about the writing process as a dog trainer is about training dogs — with good reason; she's on about training your muse to perform on command. But she also acknowledges there is magic involved — and that you can teach it to come to you. And it’s true.

I can't do justice to her whole philosophy here, but this is my own nutshell version of Dorothea, which I've used on and off for more than ten years.

(read the rest of the post here )

Paper beads

One of the ways in which I unwind of an evening, after walking my dog,  is to watch TV, but I seem to be like my mother in that I can't just watch TV without doing something. What I do varies according to my interest or needs at the time. I go through cycles.

A while back I had a spurt of making paper beads, and as usual, inflicted some of the results on my long-suffering friends. Paper beads are very easy to make and the results can be surprisingly attractive. The first ones I made were from a free local magazine and I cut the triangles in random widths. They turned out rather well, so I strung them into a necklace and made a pair of earrings as well.

I had an old calendar picture whose colors I liked, so I decided to turn it into beads, too. It had wide white borders, so rather than cutting them off or having white beads, I drew stripes and squiggles on the borders with a permanent black marker. This is the result, the paper beads teamed with copper-colored freshwater pearls. (BTW, the safety pin you might have noticed is attaching the two tiny earrings to the necklace so they don't get lost— it's not part of the design. ;)

My next inspiration was to turn a couple of friend's book covers into beads. I printed the covers out on glossy photo card. This book cover became the necklace and earrings below it. I chose pinks and greys because they're colors my friend often wears.

I wanted to inflict--er, make another lot of beads with another friend's RITA finalling cover and she said, how about a bracelet? So since she wears red really well, I experimented with a few variations on the bracelet design.

And at the conference a few weeks ago I gave to the HeartsTalk people some paper bead necklaces and earrings made from pages of HeartsTalk, the Romance Writers of Australia monthly magazine, which is printed in black and white.

I've made rather a lot of beads now and am moving back to other pursuits. (Friends in various parts of the world heave audible sighs of relief.) Here's a handful of my beads that a friend of mine took a photo of.

If you're interested in making paper beads yourself, there's an on-line tutorial here. It's fun, cheap and the beads can be pretty. I'll probably do another batch as Christmas approaches and make strings of them for the Christmas tree.