4 in the morning

[smokingboot]

The man is asleep and the cats are asleep, and there is no room for a shifting and uncomfortable boot under the fur bedspread. So I have pottered round the house for an hour and finally find myself here, with the very hot very sweet coffee in the very cold night, rain outside, talking incessantly, encouraging me to go out, because it has a secret to share with me; if I pad out to the end of the garden, I'll find there's nothing there - I'll just be staring out at a mass of dark clouds swirling in the sky and at my feet. The full moon is out there somewhere, but it's hiding. They'll put the world back in the morning, at about 7 am, two hours away.

So here instead of any sense or savour is a recipe for a witch's jelly plus skeletons.

You need:

a small transparent jar,
two pints of water
3lbs caster sugar
and something like 50 open red (or red and pink) fragrant roses.

Boil the water and the sugar.
Add the juice of a lemon, and the rose petals, stir well, boil.
Add a bit of butter (unsalted)to clear the scum.
Simmer for an hour, during which time you...

grab the rose leaves, wash them, pick off any sharp pointy-pointies and start snipping them into tiny skeleton shapes, working along the central stem and veins, folding bits of leaf; your attempts may be a bit Blair Witch, but that's OK. If you are a villain, now's the time you name them. All the time you are doing this, you must return to the jelly every five minutes and stir, or it will be brown, and you want a luscious blood red for your skeleton people to quiver in.


Then cool, pop your skellies into the transparent jar (make sure they are standing up), pour over your jelly and cover it; there now. As a very gude witch indeed, you have surrounded your boney poppets in roses and fragrance. If you get peeved you can scoop them out later and eat them on scones. Very popular with children.

Happy Friday to you!