MISERABLE MORNING!

Only in terms of the weather - everything else seems fine!
Charles has gone off to work and won't be back till late as he's going for a meal with some of his staff.
The pups and I are trying to decide how we're going to spend our day. We will have to go to Morpeth this morning, but other than that have no real plans, although I might marzipan the Christmas cake this afternoon.
I've just had a flashback to a Christmas many years ago, when I had spent DAYS decorating two cakes. One was a fairly formal design and the other was a fun cake. The fun one was covered with lots of tiny snowmen playing games, delivering presents, going Christmas shopping, throwing snowballs, skating and tobogganing and in the centre was Father Christmas. It was a little work of art! All the snowmen (and women) were dressed differently with stripy scarves and bobble hats (the ladies even had their handbags!) and all had expressive little faces, with tiny little 'tangerine' noses. I was really please with the result!
At the time, I had nowhere to store this particular cake, and ended up putting it on top of the kitchen cupboards for safekeeping. It was covered loosely with a lid, but I made the huge mistake of not making sure that it was sealed tightly.
Then Charles decided to make chips in the deep fat fryer. (Please note we hardly ever use this bit of kit now - in fact it lives in the garden shed - and chips are a rare treat in this house!) He carefully positioned the fryer on the worktop, directly under the cake and switched it on. Of course these things produce steam, which is exactly what happened. The steam permeated the cake container and caused all the little snow people to droop sadly. Their eyes began to run so that they all looked as if they were crying as the slumped over, ending up like little mounds of melted snow.
You can imagine my horror! The cake was past repair and I think I ended up scooping all the icing off and starting again with something a little less time consuming!
Anyway - I don't bother with a novelty cake any more, I think that kind of put me off a bit!!!