Advent 12 - Snowmen, sweets and Harry Belafonte (and Aled Jones - of course)

December 12th

  

Luke 2:6-7

⁶ So it was, that while they were there, the days were completed for her to be delivered. ⁷ And she brought forth her firstborn Son, and wrapped Him in swaddling cloths, and laid Him in a manger, because there was no room for them in the inn.

For me, this is the best version of Mary's Boy Child by the wonderful Harry Belafonte (click on the arrow to listen)

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The earliest recorded sighting of a snowman was depicted in a work called Book of Hours which dates back to 1367 - it was a sketched illustration.

When Boney M sang Mary's Boy Child they dressed (and looked) like snowmen, speaking of which, here's a recipe that children love to make (and eat) and Peppermint Snowmen can be served at the end of a meal instead of the usual after-dinner mints.

Here's how:

You are going to need a small (218 gm) tin of condensed milk, the sweetened variety and quite a lot of icing sugar – 1 lb 2oz (that’s 500 gm) to be precise. Some red food colouring would be good too, but you could buy black and red liquorice for scarves and smiley faces. Something else which always put in an appearance at Christmas are edible silver balls. You can also use Jelly-Tots (if you can still buy them) or Dolly Mixtures to decorate. Go on, be creative.

Sieve the icing sugar into a large bowl and add the condensed milk and peppermint essence. If you are making them with and for, children, they may not like peppermint, but you can always leave that out. Mix everything together well until you have a firm, doughy ball.

You can make coloured scarves for the snowmen by taking a small piece of the dough and adding food colouring and working it really well.

With the rest of the dough, make about thirty small balls – you could make fifteen slightly larger than the other fifteen so you have different sized bodies to heads. Put the heads on top of the bodies and make scarves from the coloured dough. You can then decorate using silver balls for eyes, buttons, etc. Put them on one side to ‘dry’.

Enjoy your minty snowmen.

Ingredients re-cap:

1 small (218 gm) tin of sweetened, condensed milk

1 lb 2 oz (500 gm) sifted icing sugar

A few drops of peppermint essence

A few drops of food colouring

Edible silver balls

Liquorice laces and perhaps Jelly Tots or Dolly Mixtures for decoration.

But we can't have snowmen without Aled - click the arrow to see and hear the beautiful story

To see more recipes in our Advent Calendar Recipe Book, please click here 

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