All the homemade Christmas people over here please, lets share our ideas :)

[BabyDubsEverywhere]

Do we have a 'Homemade Christmas Thread' going yet? Ive linked to last years below, I am determined to MAKE MAKE MAKE this year and bugger the responses

I need a fail safe mulled wine kit to give people please if anyone can help, Thankyou :)

Last years thread!

I have got loads of bramley apples to use up, any ideas as to what to do with them?

Plan for today is Sloe and Blackberry picking with DH&DCs, even that makes me feel a little bit Christmassy

Thats if I ever get off PinInterest as I got my invitation this morning (only applied last night!)

Just thought id mention, anyone who is finding the ideas on this thread useful should really read last years too, (its linked at the bottom) .....so many GREAT ideas for original/cheap/homemade gifts, tis the real spirit of Christmas :)

Can anyone give me a clue on the best place to buy the 1 ltr jars? I'm looking online but they seem so expensive, it won't be worth my while doing anything.

Have a look in the £ shop or 99p shop. Also Asda do some nice Kilner type ars that aren't that expensieve. Maybe look in Wilkinsons too. And you could always switch your instant coffee to Dowe Egberts - their jars are lovely and make great sweet presentation jars.

I've see reasonably priced jars in Dunhelm Mill and Wilkinsons, they both had large ones.

TeaOneSugar, I've used the following recipe for the past two years:

Fudge

Ingredients
? 200ml Milk
? 250g Butter
? 1kg granulated Sugar
? 5 tbsp golden syrup
? 400g condensed milk

Method

1. Put all the ingredients in a saucepan and boil on a high heat for 15-20 minutes, stirring constantly, until it reaches 115C on a sugar thermometer.

1. Pour into a mixing bowl and leave for 5 minutes to cool slightly. Whisk until the sugar crystallizes turning the mixture from toffee to fudge. It will look matt and a little grainy.

1. Spoon into a baking tray lined with greaseproof paper to cool and set. Cut into cubes after about an hour and put on a cooling rack to cool completely.

It is gorgeous and the recipe makes quite a lot. My family love it. I usually make it about a week in advance and then store in bags in the fridge. HTH.

maclover125 Thank you

Has anyone ever tried a Guinness Christmas Cake? I don't like Christmas puddings/cake but want to try my hand at making cakes (mastered puddings). Thought a Guinness Christmas Cake might be nice for my BiL (maybe even my brother if I have time to make one when home for Thanksgiving) but don't know if it's worth the bother.

Have a look at Ikea jars for the 1 l jars, they also do other sizes! The 1 l one is £0.99!

Ooh thanks. Ikea ones are perfect.

Thanks ancient that is exactly what I needed, woohoo! :)

I am having loadsa fun with pinterest boards.

pinterest.com/olessaty/

hi everyone, how's the homemade christmas plan looking in your houses?

I am getting ready to decant my christmas pudding vodka, so need to get some bottles for it! want to do it soon, as we're TTC at the moment, and I think I have a week before I shouldn't be drinking, just in case :o am also planning some pear vodka (maybe with a wee bit of dried ginger in it?) and some raspberry vodka, just because I can :o I'm hoping to be able to pick sloes at work soon - there are some huge bushes just off campus - and then can make some sloe gin for next year. does anyone know how you can tell a) when to pick sloes and b) that they are definitely sloes? we have some bushes near our house which are groaning with what i think are sloes, but I'm not sure. don't want to make essence of pure poison by mistake :o

I've just ordered some stamps too so I can stamp merry christmas onto everything, and make some nice labels for my bottles.

think i'll be making some nut brittle before christmas too, and see how edible that is as gifts - I have so many friends overseas and in the far north, that I need some fairly lightweight gifts that will keep for long enough to make it worth posting them.

I've made a list of everything I need to get for my hampers. It's totaling £54 for 5 hampers which I'm pretty pleased about. Going to start getting it in bits. Mostly from eBay. I did price up some things from hobbycraft but it was quite expensive to get stuff from there.

Marking my place.
So far only made jars of nigella's pink grapefruit marmalade which always goes down well with the boys. I'm a bit scared of following the Pinterest links as i fear i may not get any work done again before christmas if i go there...

Also on the jars front, for marmalade and jams the best solution i've found is going to lidl and buying their mixed fruit jam (29p a jar)- it comes in a glass bottle with a plain white lid so looks very smart emptied out and refilled with a nice label. I do feel a bit guilty when chucking the contents in the bin, but i can get three for a pound

oh, i could never throw out jam!! you should be making tons of jam tarts :o I've just ordered a load of bottles from a company called Phillip Morris, as they have the padova flat 200 ml bottles I was after. time will tell if thay are any good. these also look quite good for jams. I am not doing any jams this year - maybe next year, when we have a large enough collection of empty jars in the house!! I've actually started getting the jus-rol pizza occasionally, as the wee jar that the sauce comes in is very cute (and DH lurves anything pizza-related) by this time next year, I should have quite an extensive jar collection in the shed!!

£54 seems like a bargain for 5 hampers LilBB! I have not calculated how much presents have cost, but know it will be easier this way regardless, as I've basically spread the cost over several months. Normally we get to mid-november and go crazy on amazon.

I made the mistake of telling my mother that I'm doing home-made presents this year, and she cringed. oh well, my sister always does home-made stuff (cushions and scarves), and it has normally disintegrated by the following year - at least mine will be edible!!

Where do you get nice bottles for the vodka please?
I think I'm sorted for jars for chutneys and nuts (not brave enough to do jam).

kveta, normally i'd agree with you but their jam is pretty terrible! I suppose you don't get much for 29p!!

electricslide a bit along the same lines as the cheap jam, I found it was cheapest to buy bottles of cheap dessert wine and drink it :) and then use these bottles, I got new stoppers for pennies from our local hardware store that does all the stuff for homebrewing. There are some quite pretty shaped bottles once you start looking and it's crazy but it's cheaper than just buying bottles.

Been watching this thread with much interest. Deciding to go the home made route this Christmas and getting lots of ideas from here. Have also joined Pinterest OMG am absolutely hooked - TOO MANY ideas!!

Now with this re-using old bottles - are a lot of the bottle openings pretty standard ie. is it easy to find different sized "stoppers" for the different type of bottles. I tend to have a lot of screw-top bottles (olive oil bottles in the main) and was wondering about re-using these. Would I have to try and source new screw top lids and is that easy? Or would I be better off just stoppering them (although that would look a bit naff with the screw thread showing on the outside?). I've been on that JBC site and it looks quite good value for money if buying new.

My list so far is:
Jam (about 16 jars done this week already)
Lemon sugar scrub
Skittles vodka
Christmas Pudding Vodka
Biscuits of some description
Possibly fizzy bath bombs (saw a lovely Martha Stewart recipe)
Peppermint Bark

I made bath bombs and soaps with stuff from bathbombbiz with DC1 last year and just couldn't believe how easy it was to get a nice result. Aunties and teacher sorted for not too much £! This year I've bought a giant bomb mould (just used fancy silicone ice cube tray from asda last year) and some goldfish to make giant bombs for the kids' stockings that dissolve and leave a fish to play with in the bath. Kveta your jar site is fab - I wish I'd seen it before I did my big jamfest last week

DH and I decanted the christmas pudding vodka last night and YUM. not sure much will make it out the door, tbh. I will need to dilute it a wee bit with water too, as currently it is lethal, so that means all the more to give as gifts!

we tried filtering it through a coffee filter, but that was going to take forever, so instead we decanted it through a sieve, and then returned it to the (cleaned and sterilised) jar, and will decant it next week, slowly, so as to keep most of it sediment free, then will filter the dregs.

can't wait to decant the citrus whisky and the blackberry vodka in november now!

Well done Kveta, You've spurred me on to get started although I do fear that rather alot of mine will assume be consumed long before the sound of sleigh bells can be heard!

Oooh, meant to say the Wham bar vodka went down a treat but does need to be skimmed and then sieved several times.

I posted this on another thread,but this thread seems a bit more active and I need a reply as I need to use the strawberries this weekend.

I want to make some flavoured vodkas this year for the PILs and my brother.

I'm going to make the christmas vodka for pils and I'm thinking strawberry vodka for my brother as I have a fridge full of strawberries at the minute which I'm never going to eat.

My question is how long do they keep?

From what I've read, the strawberry vodka should only take about a week to make, but I'm worried that it won't be much good by christmas. Could I leave the strawberries to soak for longer? What happens if I leave them in for a few weeks?

As for the christmas pud vodka - I know the recipies say to leave the ingredients in for anywhere between a week and two months, but how long will they keep once filtered and bottled?