Christmas break

At the moment I am enjoying a very welcome christmas break. And even though christmas always comes with a busier schedule than anticipated, I still got some hobby-projects done. The whole plum-project is now finished and in bottles, for instance. The two varieties of liquor/schnapps turned out to be very pleasant drinks. We made a sweeter variant where we boiled the fruit and added a bit more sugar, and that is a nice drink to sip from. The unboiled and less sweet variant turned out to be great for a shot after christmas dinner as a digestive.

The strong stuff. Left the less sweet variant, and on the right the sweeter one. Boiling the fruit resulted in a very different colour.

The plum wine project is now also finished. It was my first brewing project and it was a lot of fun. I learned a lot of new things by trying this out and I will certainly keep on brewing. The wine turned out to be rich in plum taste, and on the sweet side. I have not measured the alcohol concentration in any of my brews this time, but it tastes quite strong. Certainly over 10 percent, and maybe over 12. Now I have six bottles of plum wine and six bottles of elderberry port aging in a cool dark spot. I will age them for a couple of months and pop open a bottle of each in may.

The plum wine. It has a very nice light orange colour, and it is clearer than this picture makes one think. 

I also found a few hours to sit down with a knife and some bits of wood, and whittled away at some butter spreaders that came is very handy during our christmas brunch. It is nice to see others use and appreciate your own work. Wooden spoons are not really used in the family, so finding the spreaders well recieved was nice for me.

Some spreaders. Fun to carve, and very useful. I will be making more and play around with the curves a bit. 

For good measure I`ll include a picture of the brunch-table that was a joint effort of the whole family where everyone made very nice things in abundance.

One of my guilty pleasures in this time of year is to have breakfast with the left overs of the brunch the day after. Gingerbread men, cake, a cinnamon roll and coffee from a sycamore kuksa? A proper start of any day I imagine.