Needless to say it’s been a wonderful and scrumptious feasting. Best of all were the family get-togethers, with two exquisite new grandbabies to cuddle. Who could ask for more!

I seem to somehow create an inordinate amount of leftovers and so today the time had come for the situation to be addressed. I did write of course, the Leftover Makeovers book, but there were some extra bits and pieces I wanted to play with.

For example, between making pastry and cakes, there was well over a kilo of butter bits, tucked away, albeit safely wrapped, in various corners of the fridge.

I’d bought loads of milk too, of the delicious full creamery Tasmanian kind.

Our chooks forgot to take a holiday so there were eggs everywhere, not to mention a dozen egg yolks leftover from pavlovas.

Butter was first cab off the rank – how about some ghee, as I’d not made it before? What a wonderful process that is to watch, almost therapeutic, as the butter simmers and froths, then subsides, clears, the solids clump and finally froths again. This is the stage where is strained through several thicknesses of muslin. It looks and tastes amazing.

Next – I had a large tub of ganache as well plus some of Stephanie’s raspberry curd.

Then there was the lemon curd style filling I’d made for the lemon meringue eclairs… and so the list went on. How best to utlise them?

It seemed like to ideal time to make lots of Neapolitan-style ice cream. Three bowlfuls of the respective flavoured base custards are now cooling in the fridge before churning. Instead of vanilla ice cream I incorporated the lemon curd, yum.

 Frozen in layers in rectangular containers, I will then turn it out and cut into slices to place between ice cream wafers for tasty ‘cream-betweens’ as we used to call them. Just need grandchildren to come to eat them, lots of them. Hope they are hungry as I made rather a lot.

Of course there’s a price to pay for all this experimentation, and no-one could ever say I’m a tidy cook as anyone who visits well knows. Neverthless, clean up I must as Stephanie is on her way out to visit. This afternoon we plan to do some pressure canning.

This evening there are red currants and raspberries to be picked, and so it will be time and opportunity for more experimentation. Bliss.