The Nanny Piggins Guide to Conquering Christmas
Read The Nanny Piggins Guide to Conquering Christmas Online
Authors: R. A. Spratt
Tags: #Children's Fiction
This is not a survival guide to Christmas. This is a guide to
conquering
the Yuletide season! That’s right, it is time to take a stand – don’t suffer through another year of brussels sprouts, gift-wrapped socks and slobbery kisses from great aunts who forget to put their teeth in. Take control of your Christmas and put the happy back in your holiday, using the handy hints, games and inspiring stories within this book.
Nanny Piggins’ Christmas Message
Recipe – Nanny Piggins’ Extremely Simple Christmas Cake
Nanny Piggins and the Santa Photo
Recipe – Nanny Piggins’ Fruit Mince Pies
Nanny Piggins and the Christmas Carol Showdown
Recipe – Nanny Piggins’ Shortbread Cookies
Recipe – Nanny Piggins’ Quick and Easy Chocolate Cake
Another Christmas Letter from Boris
Nanny Piggins and the Great Boxing Day Disappointment
Recipe – Nanny Piggins’ Holistic Lemon Cake
Recipe – Nanny Piggins’ Gingerbread
Nanny Piggins and the First Christmas
Recipe – Nanny Piggins’ Rock Cakes
Letter from Mrs Claus to Boris
Recipe – Nanny Piggins’ Chocolate Cookies
To
Violet & Samantha
Christmas can be a terrible ordeal. Having to spend time with your relatives is bad enough. But sometimes, when all the shops are shut for the holidays, you can find yourself trapped in the house having run out of cake ingredients. So, after you have wept self-pityingly on the floor for a while, the question is – what do you do when you are desperately hungry for cake, but you have no butter or sugar (and you’ve been a naughty girl so there is no chance of Santa stuffing any in your stocking)? Well, you have to resort to drastic measures. That’s right – I’m talking about putting fruit in your cake. Normally I would never dream of ruining cake with such a healthy ingredient but if you need cake and you have no other choice, here is how to make one.
1 kilogram mixed dried fruit
600 millilitres chocolate milk
2 cups self-raising flour
1. Soak the dried fruit in the chocolate milk overnight. (This will make the fruit so deliciously moist and sweet you will almost forget it is fruit.)
2. Then stir the self-raising flour into the fruit and milk. And that’s it! Amazingly, this simple mixture will turn into cake.
3. Pour this batter into a greased and paper-lined cake tin.
4. Bake in a pre-heated oven at 170°C for 75 minutes.
That just three ingredients can make a cake is practically a Christmas miracle! And since there is no butter or sugar in the recipe, you can eat twice as much of it. True, it does not give you the same eyes-roll-back-in-your-head sugar-hit euphoria that you get from a slice of mud cake. But this Christmas cake will sustain you through till Boxing Day when you can rush out to the shops and start buying Easter eggs.
PS. I got this recipe from a woman who works at the police station, which just goes to show that getting arrested can have some lovely unexpected benefits.
‘Piggins, I need you to take the children down to the shopping centre to have their photo taken with Santa,’ said Mr Green.
It was such an unexpected thing for him to say, Nanny Piggins almost chocked on her chocolate bar. (She often served chocolate bars for breakfast on Friday mornings, because she was exhausted from cooking chocolate-flavoured baked goods all the rest of the week.)
The children just groaned.
‘Did I just have an out-of-body experience?’ asked Nanny Piggins. ‘Or did your father really just ask me to take you to have your photo taken with Santa?’
‘No, you didn’t have an out-of-body experience,’ said Derrick.