We make a variation of these every winter, they are essentially meringues "with bits in". You'll need:

3 egg whites
250g caster sugar
150g flaked almonds
50g small dark chocolate drops

Pre-heat the oven to 140 degree celsius. Whisk the egg white until stiff, adding the sugar. Once stiff, add almonds and chocolate drops, stirring by hand with a large spoon. Drop spoonfuls of the mixture onto greased paper and bake for about 25 minutes - if they are not quite done by then, just turn the oven off but leave the meringues in, to dry through a bit more. You can also add cinnamon, ground or chopped hazelnuts...we've done a lot of variations over the years. Enjoy :)

Toby says: James' parents got eaten by a rhino, and he had to live with his not very nice aunts. He went into a peach and there were insects in the peach, they were living in the stone. They had lots of adventures, and they were really cool. They ended up in New York. I liked that the book was really adventurous.

Mummy says: Toby got a whole pack of Roald Dahl books for his birthday, and this was the first one we read together. It was such fun - we were scared of the Cloudmen, talked about how many seagulls it would take to lift a house, and decided that it would be very cool to live in a peach stone house in Central Park, and have giant ladybirds and centipedes as friends.

Toby says: Wombat lives in Australia. He lives underground in a deep burrow. He loses his Mummy, and he meets some animals and a little boy. They make fun of him because he only digs and thinks. Then, there was a forest fire, and he dug and dug and dug. All the animals and people he saw, they all went into his little tunnel, and they were saved. Then he told all the animals that he had lost his Mummy, and they all split up and found her.

Mummy says: This was our first reading around the world book that Toby read to me (with the others, he'd read the odd page, but not the whole book). The text is just repetitive enough to not be daunting, and you meet lots of creatures from Australia - kookaburra, wallaby, koala, and emu, for example. The book was a lot bigger than we expected, it's a proper big picture book, and a lovely addition to Toby's book shelf.

Tatjana told us about these very yummy sweets - here is what she said:

Here's one of my favorites:
 Melt 125 gr butter, 100gr powdered sugar and 200 gr dark chocolate. Take candy paper cups, put a cherry in each (we use cherries from '' slatko'' , a traditional thin fruit preserve but you can just boil cherries and sugar until it gets the consistency of syrup) and fill in with melted chocolate. Refrigerate. 

As luck would have it, we were hoarding a couple of jars of sour cherry compote, which is not easy to get hold of in the UK, and which sounds like it's very close to the Serbian "slatko" Tatjana mentions. Looking at Google images, there are lots of ways to decorate these, we went for the messy "let's just plop them in the paper cups" approach.

Jenn suggested we have a go at making Buckeyes, and several other people said that they make them, too. Here's the recipe we used:

3/4 cup peanut butter
1/2 cup butter, softened
1/2 teaspoon vanilla extract
3 cups confectioners' sugar
2 cups semisweet chocolate chips


Mix all ingredients apart from the chocolate, and roll into bite-sized balls (it feels a bit like playing with wet sand!) Pop a cocktail stick (we actually used half a cocktail stick) into each ball, this will be your "handle" later. Pop into the fridge for half an hour (if you want, use that half hour to write a letter, like we did!) Melt the chocolate chips, then take out the dough balls, swirl them in the chocolate and put onto wax paper to set. Once you've done them all, put them in the fridge to set properly.

Toby says: It was really sad. Sadako was a little girl, and she had to go to the doctors. She had leukaemia from the atom bomb. She was folding a thousand paper cranes so that she could get better again, but she actually died. I liked the book, it was a sad book, though. There is a statue of Sadako in the Hiroshima Peace Memorial Park in Japan.

Mummy says: This was another book that had stayed with me since childhood, and as a result of it, I have been folding paper cranes - out of receipts in restaurants, scraps of paper while we wait somewhere...Toby had been playing with these since he was tiny, and I always told him that I learnt how to fold them because of a book I'd read as a child. What I didn't realise was one important change the author made - when we researched the book, it turned out that Sadako actually managed to fold a thousand paper cranes, but died anyway. In the book, she falls short of her target, and her class mates finish the remaining cranes, so that she gets buried with a thousand paper cranes. 

Of course, we had to have a go at making a paper crane. With a bit of help, this is Toby's first one :)

Lee from Pennsylvania shared this recipe with us - we are always a bit scared making "old family recipes", just in case they don't end up looking anything like how they should. All we can say is that these are very yummy! We filled a jar to give away, and have another one left over to eat ourselves. Thanks so much, Lee! Here's the recipe, in Lee's own words:

This is one that I do every year, it can't be Christmas with out them. This recipe has been made in my family for as long as anyone can remember. and of course they are my fav! They are also super easy. We never knew the real name so they are called Tiger's cookies (that was my nick name as a child) 3 cups oatmeal, 3 Tablespoons baking Cocoa powder, mix them in a large bowl and set aside. now boil 1/2 cup milk, 2 cups sugar,1/4 cup butter once it has come to a rolling boil add 1/2 cup peanut butter. take off heat add the dry ingredients. Have a baking sheet covered in wax paper, drop teaspoons of the dough onto it, let cool and enjoy once they have cooled. To store keep in a tin. Hope you like them as much as I do and still enjoy making them with my family.

We made this as part of our "food as a present" idea - since we started to cook and bake our way around the world, we have so much cake in the house, we need to share it! So, these coconut ice cubes, we made to give away.

We used:

- 1x 400g tin of evaporated milk
- 400g icing sugar
- around 330g of desiccated coconut (we say "around", we had a packet, which was 200g, then a "rest of a packet", which was maybe 40g, that made the texture too sticky, and when Mummy looked in a panic to see what we could use, we found another half-used packet of desiccated coconut, and threw in enough so the mixture handled like a dough. You see, we are well prepared and think everything through!)
- a few drops of red food colouring (optional)

Mix the evaporated milk, icing sugar and coconut in a bowl until you have a dough (tip, the longer it "sits" or the warmer it gets, the stickier it gets). Divide in two and work a few drops of red food colouring into one half (possibly better than we did, unless you like the mottled look). Cover a work surface with cling film, dust both film and rolling pin with icing sugar (frequently, in the case of the rolling pin!) and roll one half of the dough into a...well, oval. Repeat with the other half, so you have two separate, rolled out shapes (preferably the same kind of shape). Flip one so it's on top of the other, and roll with a rolling pin a couple of times (we liked doing this with the cling film still attached, it made it easier. You are now supposed to have a two-toned oval, roughly an inch thick. If, like us, you have something a lot thinner (oops!), peel off the cling film, fold in half and gently roll out again to make the folded bits stick to each other.

Leave uncovered for several hours (we waited five), then cut into cubes. They'll still be a bit sticky from the other side, so flip them over and leave to dry a bit more. Feel free to nibble on off-cuts as you go along. Enjoy!

Today is "Nikolaustag", St Nicholas Day. "Nikolaustag" is German, and they have "Nikolaustag" in Germany, and in Austria, and Switzerland. In Holland and Belgium, it's called "Sinterklaas". It's a day from the Catholic calendar, but just like Christmas, it has become a part of culture for lots of people.

St Nicholas was really Greek, and he lived a long time ago, around the year 350!! That's over one-and-a-half thousand years ago. It says that he used to leave secret presents. If you would like a present from St Nicholas, you have to be good all year, and the evening before St Nicholas Day, you have to clean your shoes or boots, and leave them for St Nicholas to find (Mummy said I couldn't leave my new Wellington boots that are still two sizes too big and didn't need cleaning). It's great because the bigger you get, the bigger your shoes get! St Nicholas always brings me lots of chocolate and a little present. This year, I got "Alfie Small: Captain Thunderbolt and the Jelloids", and I can read the Alfie Small books by myself, and I really like them. If you are naughty, St Nicholas just leaves twigs in your boots, but I've never had twigs, and Mummy says she's never had twigs, either! St Nicholas sometimes comes to grown-ups' work places, too, and leaves little anonymous gifts. I cleaned my boots really, really carefully, I even cleaned the bottoms and the inside of the straps! I really like Nikolaustag because it feels like Christmas is coming soon, and is already here a little bit!