You know it's Christmas when...

... you're standing in the middle of St Pancras station among crowds of stressed travellers eating a Pret Christmas Lunch sandwich.

Last minute marzipan

As I was gearing up for the big Christmas shop on Oxford Street last week, I decided that maybe this was the year to make gifts that would, for once, be received with a bit of festive glee rather than 'oh, great... you made this yourself!'
We had a party at the weekend I wasn't sure that marzipan chocolates would be a winner among a group of hungover/boozy twenty somethings, but I was wrong. They all got snaffled up, including my dodgy-looking handmade marzipan fruits.
The recipe is so easy it doesn't really deserve to be called a recipe. We used some plain and brandy marzipan from Waitrose, and a few packets of dark Menier chocolat patissier.

Roll the marzipan into Malteser-sized rounds, and get the chocolate melting. For two standard-sized blocks of marzipan, you'll need about a bar and a half of the chocolate and it's definitely worth getting the good stuff, because it doesn't separate or get all gunky like confectionery chocolate sometimes does. Melt it in a bain-marie and roll the rounds in the chocolate, then fish them out carefully using a fork to make sure the excess chocolate drips back into the bowl.

Pop them on a sheet of greaseproof paper and leave them in the fridge for a few hours. If you want you can also melt some white chocolate and use it to create decorative swirls and stripes on top. The chocolates can then be packaged up in all their gorgeous sugariness as little extra gifts. Sweet!

Sugar rush in Soho

My pal Saz and I went to try out the newly-opened Hummingbird Bakery in Soho this week. The decor: very cute. The cakes: very, very cute.

Hummingbird's most famous confection is the red velvet cake, which I had in cupcake form. The sponge was sweet, rich and moist, coloured an incredibly lairy crimson shade and topped with white cream cheese icing. Black-bottomed chocolate cake was also a serious sugar hit packed with chunks of chocolate. Of course, all the cupcakes looked calorifically beautiful lined up under the glass in all different colours, including the special Christmas ones with Santas and reindeers on top. It may not be grown-up, but sometimes you just need a big pink cupcake with glittery sprinkles on top after a hard day in the office.