Patrick Swayze and lemon meringue icecream

Yip, my two old stand-bys – Dirty Dancing, and a very decadent dessert. They’ll get me through the next couple of days.

Here’s the recipe for the ice-cream. It’s so easy even I can’t screw it up, and the people rave about it. Rave, I tell you.

You need
1 tin of condensed milk
1 tablespoon grated lemon rind (I think the fancy chaps call it zest?)
The juice of 4 lemons
375ml cream (the cream here comes in 250ml tubs so I just use 2 of those. My maths was never very good)
2 cups crushed meringues (you can substitute lemon wafer biscuits if you can’t get your hands on meringues)

You do
Mix the condensed milk with the rind and the juice.
Whip the cream until it’s stiff then fold it into the condensed milk.
Fold in the meringues or wafers.
Freeze.

I don’t know what the minimum time is for freezing, I usually make mine the day before I need it so it gets lots of time to freeze. I need a batch for tomorrow (lunch at Anne’s house) and another batch for Wednesday (braai at friends of Rob). And I’m making chocolate liqueur mousse for tomorrow as well. Come January, this fatty boom-boom will be knocking on that Weigh-Less door again.

Hope you all have a lovely festive time, sun or snow.

To be continued…

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another moomflower

I can post this pic now because the moomflower has just been collected and is about to be handed over as an early Christmas gift. It is for my friend’s niece, who is 14, and apparently she has always admired the one I first made for Alison (here).

Please note: this is my first attempt at using Ribbet (www.ribbet.com), and clearly the possibilities are going to be endless. It’s a free download and has loads of special effects and fonts and stickers… I thought I should start putting the Jam Tarts name on my pics in case any of the big international interior designers stumble across my stuff and think how incredibly original it all is hahahahahahahaha

Rondebosch Night Market = big success, by the way. Yay. Exhausted.
Normal Rondebosch market on Saturday morning again, and then I’ll do the Kalk Bay market on Sunday. After which, I really really will break for Christmas.

To be continued…

in the spirit of….

Just to prove to you that I don’t actually hibernate over Christmas, I made a photo frame with a darling season-appropriate message:

I have done frames with various captions, and for some reason they have flown off the sales table.
Bonus: this will be my entry for Maryanne’s December Made-It Challenge.

An aside – the heat is still rising here in Cape Town. I have no words to describe how ghastly it was yesterday, and Alex and I had to drive around doing stuff. Pure utter hell.

To be continued…

December

There are those of us who don’t throw ourselves into the pre-Christmas madness of frenzied shopping and partying, and yet December is always a busy time. I’m not trying to be a wet blanket, and I’ve loved seeing everybody’s xmas crafts (and no vendor loves a Christmas market more than me!), but there was something about emigrating to South Africa when I was 8 and having to swop snow and the Blackpool illuminations for a sun-burningly hot holiday where a braai was more appropriate than a traditional xmas dinner, that kind of ruined it all for me. It has also always been a time of extreme family tension so, while I enjoy watching everybody else’s fun and find myself singing along to Boney M in Pick ‘n Pay, I remain detached and only really perk up around the 28th. Father Christmas used to make a quick visit when Alex was small, and we even used to put up a tree (never a family tradition on my ex-husband’s side, being a Goldberg!) but by about 14 or 15 she grew out of it herself.

Right, now that I’ve got that off my chest, December has been busy for Jam Tarts because of all the December markets. We have another one lined up tomorrow, the Rondebosch Night Market from 3.30 to 8.30, and two more on the weekend. In between I’ve been making new stock and meeting orders. (Excuse lousy pics).

Right, another scorchingly hot day coming up – in fact, it was already too hot for comfort by 06h00, so I’m really going to suffer today.

To be continued…

this little piggie went to market(s)

Thank heavens it’s Monday. Jam Tarts did two markets this weekend and all I can say is that I’m ready for some R and R.

The Harfield Carnival was a mixed bag for us – the intermittent downpours and high-force winds didn’t bring anyone any joy, but in the in-between bits it was wonderful: Karen completely sold out her rice-bag pillowcases and shorts, plus one customer sent a mail ordering a further ten. We felt Karen deserved the day off yesterday – so she could stay home and make more. hahaha

Yesterday was the Kirstenbosch Market, always a pleasure to be there! The weather had sorted itself out, and the steady flow of holiday shoppers and tourists was very welcome.

You’ve seen a zillion pics of Jam Tarts’ stuff, so I’m not going to bore you with more.
Here is other stuff: we all fell in love with these meerkats, made from jacaranda wood. Gran bought a whole family of them, I think.

We had a new neighbour, Carolyn from Car-o-Shop, who makes car seat covers at incredibly reasonable prices. Since crocheting a car seat cover is going to take too large a chunk of time, I think I’ll ask her to run something up for Mini-me. I’m thinking lime and shocking pink zebra stripes…

Dear friend Lara came to visit, with three lovely boys in tow. She’s good like that. The boys loved our owl monsters, and Max and Noah took it upon themselves to name any owls who had made it to the market without name tags. On the left in the middle, you can see a little turquoise chap who became “Snowflack”, and I had meant to put him in my basket to take home with me. But alas, I got distracted – and Snowflack got purchased by a complete stranger.

Lara tried on a button bangle and it looked so nice that I gave it to her as an early xmas present.

The only reason she is covering her pretty nose is because she’d just smeared thick white sun protector on her face – the South African sun is a real killer, so take note and take care. Seriously.

Last but not least, here is our amazing mountain in the background. The Kirstenbosch market is held right across the road from the Kirstenbosch National Botanical Gardens, and the entire area is – what can I say? – like paradise. Life would be very flat indeed without our Table (no pun intended).

To be continued…

PS. I finally returned the fixed-up stool to my across-the-road neighbour. Seems I had timed it just right because her mom was visiting her at the time, and was overjoyed to see it – she says she remembers her gran sitting on it in the kitchen back in the day. So it belonged to my neighbour’s great grandmother.