The Interior DIYer
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Merry half-way-there!

Back in Canada, the town I was from would celebrate “Christmas in June”. It was amazing. Everyone would go to the lake front and if you owned a boat, you would deck it out with as much Christmas stuff as you could – lights, Christmas trees, Santa’s, Christmas music, all in 35°C heat. At night all the boats would light up and twinkle on the water and it would be magical and lovely. Just for the hell of it.

There’s nothing like that here in Ireland, so fiance and I started our own tradition. 

Every Christmas fiance’s mom makes us a whopper Christmas pudding, so I’ve started saving a chunk of it for our ‘Christmas in June’. We celebrate by having a slab of pudding with a dollop of brandy butter which will knock you into next week. Fiance adores Christmas pudding, and nearly burst with excitement when I reminded him ‘Christmas in June’ was today. It’s something silly, but I love our tradition.

p.s. Due to the vast amounts of alcohol in it, Christmas pudding lasts forever. If anything, it gets better with age. 

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Happy 2012 :)

Welcome to the future! I hope you had a wonderful new years, and I also hope none of you are nursing particularly nasty hangovers today, and have recovered as gracefully as possible.

Last night I got the idea for a quirky post while looking through our cork collection – it’s a bit nerdy, but what we do is keep the cork from wine or champagne from special occasions or particularly unusual moments over the years. I keep them all in a large jar in our kitchen. Here are some of my fav {not in date order}: 

The first is as a thank you  present from   Qwerky for my first interview, next is from a wine tasting excursion on Mount Etna in Sicily in 2008, then our engagement champagne from April 2011, then our celebratory wine from moving into our first apartment in 2008, followed by our second anniversary trip to Paris later that week. 

Next is a bottle of champagne we uh, borrowed from an Interior Design grand opening at the RDS in 2009, then fiance’s scheming Valentine’s evening where he bought me these incredibly convincing faux hydrangea’s, then dining in Vienna in 2009, Valentine’s Day 2010, fiance’s 21st birthday champagne in 2008 {I later whisked him off on a holiday to Switzerland}, and lastly some more corkage from our trip to Sicily in 2008.
Those are our most special ones. I have more, but they have stories that are long winded. One particular story is when fiance accidentally opened the bottle of champagne meant for his niece’s 21st birthday – we opened it 18 years early. Sorry, Katie. Fingers crossed you appreciate the sentimental nincompoopery of me keeping the cork. 
Do any of you have odd things you keep or collect for sentimental reasons? I like to think I’m not the only one 🙂
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Mull over it

If there’s one thing fiance has talked about ad nauseum it’s the mulled wine reception my cousin had at her wedding three years ago. It was our first mulled experience, and from that moment forward, fiance has had his mind set on having one at our wedding. 
In the spirit of Christmas, last weekend we were entertaining and I gave Jamie Oliver’s mulled wine recipe a shot, and it was gorgeous. We’ve had pre-made mulled wine from both bottles and saches before, but once we tried this recipe, we’re never going back. 
I would definitely recommend making a batch or two of this stuff to kick you into the Christmas spirit. It will warm the deepest, crankiest, most Grinchiest parts of anyone. Bottoms up!
Image found via Berlin-Pedia. 

Ingredients
2 clementines
Peel of one lemon
Peel of one lime
250g caster sugar
6 whole cloves
1 cinnamon stick
3 fresh bay leaves
1 whole nutmeg {I used 1 teaspoon of dried nutmeg}
1 whole vanilla pod, halved {again, I used 1 tablespoon}
2 star anise
2 bottles of Chianti or other Italian red {we had just one}

Method
Peel large sections from your citrus fruits using a peeler. Put the sugar in a large pot over a medium heat, add the citrus peel and squeeze in the clementine juice. Add the cloves, cinnamon stick, bay leaves and 10-12 gratings of nutmeg. Add your vanilla, and add just enough wine to cover the sugar. Allow this to simmer until all the sugar has dissolved in the wine. Bring to the boil and leave there until you have a lovely thick syrup – this is a great tip Jamie gives – by making the syrup in this way and bringing to the boil before you add all the wine creates a great flavor. But if you do this with both bottles of wine in the mix, you’ll cook off all the alcohol. We don’t want that, do we?

When the syrup is ready add the star anise and the two bottles of wine. Gently warm the wine for around five minutes, then ladle into glasses to serve. 
Thanks to Jamie for the scrumptious recipe! I think my fiance may run away with him.