The adventure of trying to make a house a home that we built for our family of six plus some craft, home décor, recipes & any family fun we might have.

Friday 20 December 2013

A Crafty Christmas - Christmas Tree

I'm participating in a fun crafty challenge with Emily from Nap-Time Creations today. She's hosting different bloggers who are sharing things that they've crafted, sewn or cooked to help celebrate the meaning of Christmas. I signed up for Decorations from the recipe category. If you've visited here before you'll know I ENJOY cooking so I thought I'd challenge myself by making a decoration.


I can't believe it'll be Christmas soon and I've still got a heap of work to get done before the big day. This year I was planning on spending the day at home celebrating with the children instead of cooking up a family treat to drive for over an hour to meet up with our extended family. Now don't get me wrong I love that the kids get to see their grandparents and cousins but with the amount of traffic and the fact I don't get time to relax. So this year when I found out my parents were travelling to visit my sister and her family I knew that staying home would work perfectly for us, that was until this morning.

My youngest sister is moving out of home just before Christmas so I invited her over for lunch, easy right. I'd planned a simple menu of fruit, turkey, salad followed by Pavlova and maybe a drink especially if it was an extremely hot day. Well I'm now having to change my plans up a bit because my sister has told me that she's asked my brother and his girlfriend to come too. Now don't get my wrong, I'm not upset I have just realised that I'm going to have to be more organised as he's having to travel back home to his girlfriends place that afternoon for her families celebration. So I'm now thinking a light lunch with cold turkey and salad followed by a Shortbread Christmas Tree which will also be a table decoration. Thank you Pinterest.

To make the shortbread biscuits I used the same recipe from here but you could also use this recipe that I made last Christmas. Now to make it a little bit more special I added about a quarter cup of crushed candy canes which were leftover from the Candy Cane Bark earlier this month. So after making the shortbread dough I rolled it out and I shaped into star's. Now because I'm creating a tree I used three different sized cookie cutters to get the three star shapes.


Construction
There are few things that you can do with your shortbread biscuits to make them stick together but I wanted the bits of candy cane to be visible so I went with a minimal approach in order for the little bits of red to stand out. you could use a simple cake icing and spread it over each biscuit, place on top of each other and press down so they glue together. The method I used was to melt a small amount of white chocolate, place a small amount on your largest star, place another large star on top and press down gently so that it sticks. Keep building with the various sized stars.


When it's the way you want it place it somewhere safe so that the chocolate can harden completely. I made this while the kids were at home and I found it somewhat difficult because they stood on top of me so close that it was squashy. When I put the tree together, I had four sets of eyes watching closely this also caused a few issues when taking photographs but I finally bribed them with leftover shortbread and I got a few good pictures.


As you can see from the looks on their faces they really like the look of the table decoration so I'm sure that when I make these again on Christmas Eve the children will probably eat these first before they eat the food from their plates. My two year old loves shortbread so much that he asks for more every time I give them some for morning tea. Now that I'm having nine people for Christmas lunch I'm thinking I'll make two tree's and make them the centre pieces on Christmas Day. So do you use food to decorate your table or do you use a beautiful tablecloth and other traditional items to decorate your table?



Megan

11 comments:

  1. Oh big day for you! I love shortbread trees I make them every year but with my oven dead this year is a bake free Christmas (which actually turned out pretty good)

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    1. It's going to be a big day especially with the heat. Oh no I'm hoping you are going to someone else's house for Christmas as not having an oven is NOT FUN. Merry Christmas xx

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  2. For my daughter's end of year party @ school I did a fruit platter (thank god said the teacher). I went searching for different sized star cutters & found a set of 5 in the soon to be closed Robin's Kitchen. With these stars I made a watermelon tree using a skewer in the centre & a bit of blutac to hold it in place. Topped with a green grape, I must admit the tree looked fabulous & was quickly felled by the kids. It was such a success & so easy to do, that I'm thinking of recreating on Christmas Day.

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    1. Yum that sounds so yummy and really healthy which I could do with at this time of the year. I like this idea and I think I might just have to do this for next years Christmas. Thanks for the idea.

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  5. Sorry for my deleted comments 1+1=6, but every comment seems to get duplicated. Don't know why.....

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    1. I have the same issue with one of the blogs I follow it posts duplicates of every post she does :( That's fine as it makes my comment count look good LOL

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  6. the tree is super cute!!! I love it and your cute kids! Thanks so much for sharing at Crafty Christmas today! Emily

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    1. Your welcome Emily thank you for giving me the opportunity to participate in your Crafty Christmas series I had fun putting this together ;)

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