Winter madness

(Image courtesy of T of this is naive. – I’m recently rabbit mad… The lemon drizzle cake has a rabbit motif too!)

(Flourless Chocolate Cake. – T of this is naive is so good with taking pictures I just HAD TO ask her to let me use her pictures on my blog!)
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How are you surviving the holiday? Got the “stuffed like a turkey with party-food” drab feeling like I have?
Now that the party season is officially over (my kid’s birthday, Xmas, New Year’s Eve & New Year’s Day parties in a short period of 3 weeks+ is way too much!), I am writing this in sparkly wishful anticipation of normal life to begin it’s cycle again. Monotonous simple life is sometimes the best for très-tired self I think.
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And oh, have you hit the winter-sales yet? Me? Not yet. I like going at the very end of the sales when retailers really slash-down their sale prices. Then again, nowadays I don’t buy clothes as much as I used to anyways. – Ever since I started to earn money by “cash-in-hand” literally “counting” my earnings & not by receiving some digits on a monthly pay-slip, I value “money” a lot more. I look at a price tag on a dress & think “but that’s almost ten cakes worth!” or “but that’s x hour’s worth of work!” & put it back on the railing. When I think about the number of times I shouted “end-of-the-day Saaaaale” on my stall, in the cold winter chill, just to get that extra bit more cash to take home, I just can’t bring myself to blow big money on a whim.
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Then again, maybe I’m writing make-believe. Because I spent 60 quid on a Christmas Tree & as for my kid’s birthday, God knows how much I splashed out to cater for 10 families that we invited. And I always have to buy organic when it comes to cucumbers & carrots too even if it’s more expensive (cucumber’s got high water content & as for carrots I eat them raw so for the benefit of mind I like em “safe”).

Er, so yess… just take the previous paragraph about value with a pinch of salt actually…
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Let’s swiftly change the subject back to about the Market as this blog is ought to be about…
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Trading on my last Saturday of the year was truly madness. Guess how many truffles I made for that day? SEVEN HUNDRED!!! Madness right? It’s because I read my blog-post about the previous year’s Christmas Market day & it inspired me to make that much for this time round. – I can almost hear all of you asking how I did with its sales. Well…, (drum-roll please!) it… (now hit the cymbals!) sold out! (Fanfare!) Alright alright, it took all-day to do it but it did. And as for the hot chocolate drinks, I made over 10 litres & sold out on those too. Madness! I am sooo relieved that waking up til 4am the previous night did the trick. As you can imagine, I topped last year’s figures. Whoo-hooo! GO GIRL!
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But just like last year I had lots of cakes left & I was calling out “saaaale!” near the end of the day. (I just never ever learn.) As I sipped Baileys that got handed to me by the cheese-boys from the stall behind me, my Christmas spirit fired up & I thought it best to just hand out those unsold cakes to the people who’d been kind to me. So off the cakes went one-by-one;
– to “Ladybird S” who gives me cookbooks & toys for my kids that she should be selling,
– to S of La Bouche for letting me use electricity from his shop to power my hot chocolate machine,
– to the fish-lady who gave me some fish in return,
– to the cheese-lady & the bookseller-man for being kind & for buying from my stall every week,
– to meat-seller R who gave me 3 packs of steaks to cheer me up after a horrible man grabbed a truffle & walked off with rude remarks (he was a type of man that would loiter outside pubs asking for a spare cigarette),
– to the Market boys for their good job & also for braving the cold weather (the temperature was on average 0 degrees centigrade that day).
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And ah, talking about the cold weather, again just like last year, I caught a horrible cold which confined me to bed the next day or two. (Like I said, I just never ever learn…!)
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Happy New Year Everyone!

And don’t forget to put away your Christmas Tree on the 6th (last day of Christmas)!