Well, lets warm things up a bit and have a party!

The Fabiola & Sing Sing Christmas party will take place in Oxford, UK, on Wednesday 2 December 5-10pm.

Celebrate with us and enjoy a fabulous 15% discount on every item in our shop, as well as complimentary drinks and nibbles!

Email us if you would like to come and celebrate with us, and help us get through the champagne and cocktails!

Looking forward to seeing you! Merry Christmas!

These creative ideas can turn even the humblest cake into something special, making for an inspired celebration!

Check out some of the designs in the gallery below, or view them in further detail in the Cake Decorations section of our online store.

Send Large Files or panic attacks

He’s a food photographer who is completely obsessed with anything food and drink related and anything in between. What’s not to love!

I found his blog whilst looking for great Halloween recipes.

These Candied Apples are so striking have such a depth of colour you would think you’d served up the dark heart of Medusa and the blood of a thousand virgins.

Matt has graciously allowed me to use his gorgeous photography and recipe below. Enjoy!!

Red & Black Candy Apples

8-10 medium sized apples
8-10 wooden twigs, twimmed
3 cups granulated sugar
1/2 cup light corn syrup
1 cup of water
several drops of cinnamon flavored oil
1/4 teaspoon of red food coloring
1/4 teaspoon of black food coloring

Clean and dry the apples. Try to remove as much of the wax as possible. If you purchase them from your local farmer’s market then chances are they have not been treated with the food grade wax that makes then shine. Remove any stems or leaves and insert a twig into the end of each apple. To facilitate easier twig entry you can carefully sharpen the end of the twig or use a candy stick to create a guide hole. Set apples aside.

Heat and stir sugar, corn syrup and water in a saucepan until sugar has dissolved. Boil until the syrup reaches 300 degrees on a candy thermometer. Don’t go over 310 degrees or your candy burns and then you’ll be sad.

Remove from heat and stir in flavored oil and food coloring.

Dip one apple completely in the syrup and swirl it so that it becomes coated with the melted sugar candy. Hold the apple above the saucepan to drain off excess. Place apple, with the stick facing up, onto a baking sheet that’s greased or lined with a silpat. Repeat the process with the remaining apples. If your syrup thickens or cools too much, simply reheat briefly before proceeding. Let the apples cool completely before serving.

A note about the black apples: Lighter colored apples (Granny Smith, Golden Delicious) work well in making the red appear bright and glassy; darker apples like red delicious help the black candy appear as dark as possible. Muy spooky!

Also, Adam made one batch with red food coloring and after he had a few red apples he reheated the candy mixture and added black food coloring. Adding black to red will make it darker. He repeated the dipping process. Black food coloring can be found online or at specialty baking stores.

The snow will make it all seem even more magical.

This weekend at Temple Guiting, I am on Friday night supper duty and in my recipe search, I discovered this fab foodie-blog, Gastronomy Domine.

I have settled on chicken with cardamom and preserved lemons. It just looks warm and colourful, the kind of comfort food to eat in our wintry snowy weather!

I hope we all manage to make it safely out there, us Brits usually panic at the sight of a few snow flurries.

In my teens and early twenties, I drove many times up snowy, precarious mountains to Broken River Ski Field, near Christchurch, New Zealand.

Hopefully, the experience I gained then should prepare me for the driving conditions this weekend.

Fingers crossed!

So, the party is looming, and I have the perfect Christmas cocktail to invoke the warm sand without ignoring Christmas. It’s the Christmas Caipirinha!

(It took me forever to get over the Cosmopolitan, thanks Carrie, Samantha, Charlotte and Miranda, and kept on ordering them long after they had gone out of fashion. But, alas, the time had to come and I have moved on.)

Anyway, my fave-du-jour is the Caipirinha. So, I’m serving a winter version for this year’s festivities.

For one serving, mix as follows. Or make in large batches, without the ice and store in the refrigerator, ready to serve guests as they arrive. Add the ice to each tumbler, when you pour the pre-made cocktail mix.

• 50ml Sagatiba Pura Cachaça
• 2 lime wedges
• 5ml Sugar syrup
• 2 Blackberries
• 3 Raspberries
• 3 Blueberries
• A pinch of ground Allspice

Squeeze the lime wedges and drop into a tumbler
Add berries, sugar syrup and allspice. Mix and squish around.
Fill with ice cubes.
Add the Sagatiba Pura Cachaça.
Mix.

I will also be serving Champagne (of course!) and this year I decided that as I am invoking hot sand and sunkissed skin, I will be offering up Tsarine Brut Rosé NV Champagne.

It tastes of summer fruits and cream, and comes in a gorgeously stylish twisted-glass bottle.

Both Sagatiba Pura Cachaça and the Tsarine Brut Rosé NV Champagne are both available from your local Waitrose, but you can probably get them from other supermarkets or wine merchants if you don’t a branch close to you.

Happy Thanksgiving to all of our American readers!

Yes, even though this blog is relatively new, and Fabiola & Sing Sing is mostly selling to customers based in the UK, we do have some readers from the other side of the pond.

So, if you’re visiting us from New Orleans or New York, Oklahoma or Oregon, California or Connecticut, howdy – and I hope you’re having a great Thanksgiving with your friends and family.

I spent part of my childhood in Long Island, New York, and fondly remember the fun our family had at this time of year, and that feeling of excitement at the preparation of the feast and the games that would follow.

So, if you’re reading this and at a loose end as to what to do with your kids this weekend, especially if the weather outside is cold and miserable, here’s an idea that was inspired by the graphic I’ve used to illustrate this blog post.

Make a Lego turkey!

Yes, get your children’s imaginations bubbling by giving them the challenge of creating animals or dinosaurs or even monsters out of Lego. It will make a change from the cars, buildings and space rockets they normally make out of the toy bricks.

And don’t worry if you don’t have Lego. You could get the little rascals to make their animals or space aliens out of cardboard, cutting them carefully out of an old cereal packet and colouring them in with felt tip pens.

I’ve often wished that Thanksgiving was also celebrated here in the UK. Maybe we should petition Gordon Brown to give us a Thanksgiving holiday in that long dark stretch between Bonfire night and Christmas Day? It would certainly make November a lot more fun.

PS. If you weren’t impressed with your Thanksgiving table centerpiece this year, how about doing something like this:

Kicking yourself for not doing it now, aren’t you? Well, don’t worry – there are still a few weeks until Christmas day, so get your lego out and start building for the big day.

Have you got your own ideas on something for the kids to do at Thanksgiving or during other holidays over the course of the year? Leave us a comment and tell us about it! And in the meantime, happy entertaining!

It proved to be such a hit with the grown-ups and kids alike that I was really excited to see another book out by the same dynamic duo.

Custard and Crayons with Polly & Jago contains more fun ideas with clever monthly combinations of recipes, craft and art projects, as well as feeding your children’s mind’s with many of the stories, rituals and traditions behind the holidays, festivals and celebrations throughout the year.

The people behind the book are pretty interesting too. Sarah Rowden is one of London’s best loved “foodies” and owner of St Helen’s Food Store, in Kensington, London – a favourite haunt of the dishy David Cameron.

Meanwhile, Sarah’s collaborator Joanna Vestey is an award-winning photographer who has been on assignment for many charitable organisations such as the Red Cross and World Vision.

I must also mention the truly fantastic drawings by Mark Beech, who has illustrated the delightful ‘History of Warts’ and ‘Troll Trouble’ series of children’s books.

In my experience, great illustrations like this really add to a child’s enjoyment of a book and can help feed the imagination even further.

The Polly & Jago series of books come with a hearty recommendation from me – you need never be at a loss again when it comes to keeping the kids occupied!

Happy entertaining!

A spot of planning and then you can relax!

Entertaining guests should always be fun and relaxed, regardless of how formal or informal the occasion. If you can plan ahead and are organised this should enable you to feel more relaxed and give you more time to socialise with your guests, instead of being tucked away in the kitchen!

I always have a (rather flexible) schedule in my head of when things should happen over the course of an evening (or whatever the occasion is). Sometimes, I will even write out my schedule if it is a big occasion or if there is just a lot on my mind and not enough space in there for everything! Otherwise, and I don’t know about you, but several wines later and my beef wellington is very well done indeed!

With this in mind, I always use a timer to let me know when things are done or need checking. I use my oven timer and I have a separate hand held timer, as well. Its just so easy and I can forget about any food preparation and chat to my friends until ping!, I then need to attend to something, even if its just a stir.

The Table

I love entertaining and I always make an effort to make my table look interesting and beautiful. I find it really can set the atmosphere, whether it be fun, dramatic or or just pretty! I have collected many different sets of china and glasses over the years, so I use different sets depending on the occasion, time of year or my mood.

If you have only one set of china, you can’t go wrong with white.

They don’t need to be expensive and if you can get them from a large store chain, it is more likely that they will stock them a year later, in case of breakages. I think the white china currently stocked at Homebase, in round or square, is a bargain and looks great.

You could also use these plates from Matalan, which look good and are very inexpensive.

If you want to make more of a statement and go with a colour or pattern, do so if that makes you happy!

I have a vibrant green set of ‘Octopus’ plates from Oka, which I use as everyday plates.

The colour makes me feel happy, not to mention the complements!

To set your table, use what you have in your home and be creative! It’s a bit like getting dressed in the morning – you put on your clothes and sometimes its fun to experiment and put things together that you may not have thought of before. Well, its the same with your table. Try looking at objects you may already have and see them in a different way, they may make a pretty decoration on your table or serve a practical purpose. After all, setting your table is interior decoration in miniature!

Recently, I used some sea shells that I had stored in a box in my garage for my table. They were a bit broken and I did think to throw them out. Instead, I used some silver-leaf that I already had in my art-box and applied the leaf to the shells and voila! some pretty decoration for the table. Spray-painting would probably be easier but the thing is just to use what you have and get creative. Of course they now look great around my bathtub.

Raiding your linen cupboard for table cloths is also a good idea. I have the expanding ‘Petworth’ table from Oka, it can seat 4 up to 18 people easily, and sometimes I really do need to use a sheet from the linen cupboard, just to cover the table!

Christmas dinner is always a minimum of 12, in my family, and usually more! But often in your linen cupboard its possible to find an old embroidered blanket or piece of cloth that is really pretty but not much use – but it can look lovely on your table.

For heat protection or if my bed sheet is a bit sheer, I use table protectors from John Lewis underneath the table cloth. These can be bought pre-cut or cut to your required length from a roll. I bought it off the roll and cut different lengths, which all piece together on my table, depending on what size I have the table expanded to.

Look out for “Part two” where I’ll be giving you more tips about to entertain guests with style and flair!