Ouch! Watch out teeth! I hosted Christmas breakfast this year and I had some ‘helpers’ in the kitchen. I asked my daughter to cook pancakes as it seems to be a bit of an obsession with her at the moment. I do not know what she did to them, but they were flat and rubbery. Hubby also well and truly overcooked the bacon on the BBQ- don’t know how he managed that one!

Oh I am so sorry to hear your dessert didn’t turn out and that the dates had pips still. I didn’t go all out this year and kept it simple but the previous year, I made some lobster and i over cooked it too much that it just wasn’t enjoyable at all.

I like the response from BellaB about keeping Christmas catering for people easy. We have also made a pivot to less fuss and less cooking for Christmas. We do a lot of prep before Christmas Day and it really does make the day flow easily and makes it stress free too.

No – but our christmas meal is just a buffet of cold meats, cheeses, bread rolls and so on. Everyone assembles their own food, and it’s frankly hard to go too far wrong with foods that need no cooking and which are more or less single ingredient. I definitely go for simple.

There was no fail because we did a lot of research and planning before the day and before preparing and cooking the meal. We made a change to our Christmas menu and it did take more time to buy and to prepare the food and we did factor this in to the day.

Oh no! Not so much a fail, but we left it too late to get our berries for the pav and all our local supermarkets were sold out, so we opted for cherries as they were pretty much all that was left, with no cherry pitter this cost us so much time and was so frustrating