Here are some pictures of my Christmas baking that kept me busy during December. I know I don’t upload photos of my baking  normally but before I discovered the pleasure I got from cooking, baking desserts was the only thing  that I enjoyed.

I have been making Christmas cakes using my mother-in-laws recipes for the past 5 years. As Koreans don’t really have any specific food for Christmas, I thought it would be great to learn some of my mother-in-laws traditional food. This year, I made  quite a few Christmas cakes and gave them out to friends as presents. My mother-in-law usually  bakes 20 or more cakes and shares them with her friends. It takes 3 hours to bake one so that’s a lot of baking!!

Here is my first cake I made before Christmas and  shared at a  friend’s dinner party! It was delicious. I poured a bit of Bundaberg rum into the cake every day. The alcohol preserves the cake and keeps it very moist. My husband had to stop me from pouring too much Bundaberg rum into the cake I was liking it so much!!

The second cake I made for another friend. I even bought a proper cake box to give it to her!

My third and final cake I decorated with a few different ornaments and shared it at friend’s Christmas eve dinner party!

Here is one picture of my mother-in-laws’ Christmas cake – just to show you how the expert does it!

As well as the Christmas cakes, I also made some mince pies (pies with fruit fillings). It’s one of my husband’s favorite. He even yelled out “it smells like my mother’s kitchen!” when he came home from a meeting. (Is that a good thing?) The trick to making a mince pie is to roll the pastry as thin as possible. It took me 3 different attempts to figure out!!

The first batch was a little too thick around the edges…

Aren’t they cute? Heart and star shapes…

I was getting a little more creative on the second batch of mince pies except the fillings were over flowing.

My final batch. I must have made at least 40 mince pies in total. They were great to give out as Christmas presents.

Here is my husband’s contribution to the Christmas baking – brandy butter! He insisted that mince pies cannot be eaten without a good helping!!