Belated Solstice Greetings

My parents-in-law send and receive around 150 Christmas cards every year. Because they are artists, many of their friends are artists, so they get some lovely cards.
We have received a grand total of eight Christmas cards this year. But that's ok, because we don't send cards at all. Slightly quixotically, we send little Christmas cakes. This year, I even made the marzipan myself. 150 would be ridiculous, but we manage around 30.
The drill is make a square cake sometime in November, then at the beginning of December, cut it into little squares, which then get marzipanned, iced and decorated before being posted off to all our friends and relations. (Well, those for whom we have addresses. If you didn't get one and you think you should, send me an email!)
Unfortunately this year I cut the little square cakes carefully to fit the boxes we had bought without allowing for the extra double thickness of marizipan and icing. Luckily the Kitchen Accomplice noticed and sliced off the necessary slivers. She then had the inspired idea of crumbling up the resulting pointless pieces of cake and shaping the crumbs into snowmen, to be held together with marzipan, snowed over with white royal icing and decorated a la mode.This was the only one I saw being eaten, having lovingly but not very carefully transported it home to Ireland for a family Solstice celebration. You can see the decorations didn't really survive the journey.
I was afraid the poor little snowman's insides would be similarly messy, as we hadn't mixed anything into the cake crumbs to bind them together, but they were a triumph.

See? How cool is that for a Christmas card?

How does your garden grow?

The Kitchen Accomplice is very firmly a London girl, but even she enjoyed the freedom of my uncle's vegetable garden in Ireland.
We were staying with my cousins, who live in the comfortable half of the house, but with full access to the garden. There we dug potatoes and horseradish, pulled carrots and beets, collected cauliflower and cabbage, even courgettes.
In the greenhouse, we found perfectly ripe white peaches - one each - and some slightly less ripe ones that we peeled and puréed for Bellinis. Rich orange apricots and three final sweet raspberries added to our horde.

Wedding breakfast

My sister got married recently. Here is what she ate for lunch beforehand.



Don't you think that's the most inappropriate lunch for a blushing bride?