Your Friday Fun this week consists of Nursery Rhyme Cupcakes!

View the full set here and if that's a bit childish (pah!) you might prefer the 2009 Edible Book Festival.

While we're on the subject of playing with our food, these are amazing.

I know we're pushing it a bit for Christmas things (the three wise men have been and gone, twice) but I wanted to share the wonderful cake Ella made...

I think she did a great job. There are a few more photos here

It's our first Christmas with a child old enough to learn the names of things... sheep, cow, pig, etc. We thought it was important to get a good nativity set but we couldn't find one we liked anywhere (we are v fussy).

But we do like this...

This fantastic cake was made by Lucy Shaw in Oxford (any connection with Joseph Shaw?) and we think it's brilliant.

We decided not to try and compete with Mark and Monica's Nativity Scene this year. We don't have a horde of little nativity figures and we were not really sure where to acquire suitable moss in West Hull.

Something we were able to acquire in West Hull was fruit, brandy, icing sugar and ludicrous quantities of marzipan (four packs). So Ella has baked a rather spectacular Christmas cake and topped it with rather spectacular snowmen...

The four snowmen are singing from liquorice all sorts hymn books on which Ella has iced musical notes - each of the snowmen has a different part (base, tenor, alto and soprano) and Ella has been careful to make sure each page has the same number of beats and the appropriate clef.

She is a Christmas cake making musical nerd.

She also made use of a clever sparky-frosting technique that she learned from a kind lady in the cake shop on Boothferry Road (Ella assures me she was there to buy glycerine for the peaked icing and not to buy the cake). You can sort of see it in this photo below...

It looks spectacularly good. But as Ella said - the proof will be in the eating...

We began our celebrations with a Vigil Mass on Thursday. Fr Massie is on holiday at the moment so Fr Stephen Maughan said the mass and gave an excellent homily with many interesting connections between the Old and New Testaments regarding Mary, the Ark of the Covenant etc. He also sang the Sanctus (in latin) and he sang most (if not all) of the Eucharistic Prayer (in English).

It all fits in rather well with my own rather generous interpretation of Sacrosanctum Concilium which doesn't say "chuck the Latin, use English" but instead says the use of the Latin language is to be preserved in the Latin and then But since the use of the mother tongue, whether in the Mass, the administration of the sacraments, or other parts of the liturgy, frequently may be of great advantage to the people, the limits of its employment may be extended. and then steps should be taken so that the faithful may also be able to say or to sing together in Latin those parts of the Ordinary of the Mass which pertain to them.

If anybody wants to take those steps, so that we may also be able to say or sing together in Latin those parts of the Ordinary of the Mass which pertain to us, we are very much interested. It would be brilliant if Fr William were to invite Fr Stephen to come around one Saturday afternoon and help him put on some kind of latin chant workshop at St Josephs. The Second Vatican Council says that 'steps should be taken' and the fact that fourty years on steps have not been taken brings the phrase 'silence of dissent' to mind once again.

Anyways... feast of the assumption. Leona walked pretty much all the way home from mass. We carried her over roads (too dangerous) and it was game over when we passed the cake shop... she just stands and stares at it until we pick her up and carry her away. Speaking of cakes, we celebrated the actual feast of the assumption with a blue Mary cake. We've taken Joanna Bogle's trinity cake idea and ran with it, freestyle...

Ella wanted the cake to literally be blue, so she put blue food colouring in the cake mix. Alas, cakes are not white, but yellow. So when you put blue food colouring in they come out green...

If anybody knows how to make a cake be blue then let us know... I expect the answer is to triple the dose of food colouring. Having said that, we need to start being careful about the chemical content of our cakes. Somebody is turning in to a cake junkie...

Hopefully she'll sleep it off. All in all we've had a good Feast of the Assumption. On Sunday there's a Pilgrimage to Mount Grace. I hope we can go... but it depends on me getting lots of stuff done on Saturday... so we'll see.