Getting ready for Christmas

Lights going up in our flat...

The first term is over and I will be very glad to have a bit of a holiday. I love the run up to Christmas, and in between essays and assignments Rory and I have been busy decorating the flat, buying presents and baking Christmas cookies! I have several bits of coursework due in January, and I'm working at Newnham a bit so I won't be relaxing that much, but it will be nice to have a break from the commute at least!

The coursework at UCL is quite varied, we've been writing essays, policy documents, and doing classification exercises. The thing I've spent the most time on recently has been making my website for Principles of Computing and IT. It's very basic but I'm ridiculously proud of it! Over the holidays I'll be writing a cataloguing policy document, grappling with Universal Decimal Classification and writing a Collection Management essay.

...and at UCL

As both Rory and I have been busy recently we did about 90% of our Christmas shopping online. Mostly this worked well but we are still waiting for 2 parcels and I'm getting worried they won't get here in time :( The present for his Nan turned out to have been sent to America by mistake! As always when let loose with internet shopping we've ended up buying stuff for ourselves as well. As an early anniversary present we treated ourselves to the Game of Thrones board game. This will hopefully keep us going until April when the second season comes out!

Lumpy chocolate & raspberry tarts (yummy though)

I've been on a cooking/baking kick recently and have been trying out new recipes. Unintentionally most of them have been from the blog Annie's Eats. After they made one on Masterchef I wanted to try making chocolate and raspberry tarts. I wholeheartedly recommend that recipe, mine turned out to be delicious but rather misshapen! Then I made cookies as Christmas presents for a couple of friends, and used this lemon sugar cookie recipe. Judging by the speed they were eaten they were a success!

However one of the most unexpectedly delicious things I've eaten recently was this rather boring sounding baked spinach recipe. I had most of a bag of spinach left over and was looking for something to do with it. I made that recipe in little ramekins and it tasted fantastic and looked very cute too.

Putting my Christmas cookie cutters to good use

I doubt I'll have much time to blog for the next couple of months, so I hope you have a lovely relaxing Christmas, and see you in the New Year!