Taking (or giving) the biscuit

Biscuits are easy to make but also easy to jazz up into nice gifts. My favourites come from Holly Bell, on Recipes From A Normal Mum:

St Clement's Shortbread Stars - Super easy, and look very classy if you can manage to keep small hands away from the decorating. Of course, the splodges-and-sprinkles look is also great, especially for teacher and grandparent gifts...

Cut Out Vanilla Biscuits - the best for fiddly cutters.

Lemon Animal Biscuits - For playdough-style moulding rather than cutters.

I've previously done Nigella's Christmas Spice Cookies and they are good too.

Ikea meatball sauce

...allegedly (recipe here)

This was too thick. It's basically a white sauce made with cream and stock instead of milk. Pretty tasty, but another time I would make the usual white sauce with milk and a stock cube. Could benefit from mushroom stock, finely chopped mushrooms and maybe capers or gherkins.

The perfect tiramisu?

Taken from a Guardian article.

I made 1.5 times the quantity for a big-ish gathering, and there was definitely not as much as I expected, but then again it's quite rich. I put a quarter to a third of the mix in a separate dish (2 layers) without alcohol. In the one with alcohol, I used Kahlua as I didn't have the specified booze.

 Things I might change next time:

- make the yolk mix and then do the whites. The whites wept a bit when they were left and I think they weren't as fluffy after waiting.
- make sure the sponges are well soaked (and boozy!) without being soggy. There were dry bits.

On the mascarpone lid, there was an alternative recipe involving mixing pre-made custard with mascarpone... might try that another time!