Home Baking Day.

There was quite a lot more of the white stuff on the ground this morning. This robin and his mate were waiting for me to go so they could join in with the hens' breakfast of mixed corn.Though I don't know if you could call it snow, it was more like pellets of hail. Which ever way, it had left a nice thick layer of ice on the road.

I walked over to my neighbours' to deliver a card and a present. After a coffee and a chat I walked to the top of the hill. It was very peaceful with just faint sounds coming from the farms around- a cockerel crowing, a dog barking and the very occasional vehicle.

I could see snow up on Dartmoor to the south,


and more on the Exmoor hills to the north.

It was strange how some fields were white and others not, it didn't seem to correlate to which way the field was facing, maybe it's something to do with the length of the grass or if the field has recently had muck spread on it.

And this was the state of the road, no wonder nobody was driving along it.

The rest of my day was spent in the kitchen, I baked a Christmas cake, I had used spiced rum to soak the fruit because we didn't have any brandy so once the cake was done I fed it generously with more rum. Hopefully it will taste good. I didn't have such success with my biscuit making, I don't think my scales help as you can weigh the same thing 3 times and each time it will show a different weight with up to 4oz difference. Not too good when you are trying to weigh out flour and sugar. A second batch of spicy Cornish Farings did better until I forgot the last lot in the oven and they ended up rather well done! It's normally only at Christmas that I bake biscuits as I like to give my friendly postman a bag of home baked biscuits when he turns up in his little red van. With the 2 boys hanging around the kitchen at least half the first lot of biscuits got eaten on a 'just need to see how they taste' basis.