There’s always a small amusing incident at some point during a family Christmas. Sometimes, of course, the amusement factor comes a little later, once the pain / embarrassment / unbearable shame has subsided. This year, happily, the amusement was pretty immediate (probably due to the safe distance between the perpetrator of the amusing incident and the rest of the family).

In my last post I related what was, until this year, the family favourite festive tale. It involved a Christmas tree and an activity that might loosely be termed ‘rehoming’. That tale has now been relegated to the history books (or at least to a previous blog post). To be replaced by the following.

This year my mum decided to bake a Christmas cake. She decided quite late in the day on Christmas Eve. So, she popped to Waitrose, and found to her horror that they were all out of marzipan. She asked a shop assistant but there was none in the back either.

There was apparently some brief discussion about making her own marzipan (which she decided against for mysterious reasons to do with someone else (who wasn’t joining us for Christmas) having been worried about raw egg in 1984)… anyway. All was well because she then came up with the genius idea of buying a Battenberg cake and peeling off the marzipan to use on her Christmas cake. She went back to tell the shop assistant about this in case any future customers were similarly in desperate need of marzipan.

Not only did we get a homemade Christmas cake this year, but also some charming little pink and yellow sponge squares.