Footsteps in the Snow and other Teatime Treats. Trisha Ashley

      Footsteps in the Snow and other teatime treats

      Trisha Ashley

       Copyright

      Avon

      A division of HarperCollinsPublishers

      77-85 Fulham Palace Road,

      Hammersmith, London W6 8JB

       www.harpercollins.co.uk

      Published in Great Britain by HarperCollinsPublishers 2014

      Copyright © Trisha Ashley

      Trisha Ashley asserts the moral right to be identified as the author of this work.

      A catalogue record for this book is available from the British Library.

      This novel is entirely a work of fiction. The names, characters and incidents portrayed in it are the work of the author’s imagination. Any resemblance to actual persons, living or dead, events or localities is entirely coincidental.

      All rights reserved under International and Pan-American Copyright Conventions. By payment of the required fees, you have been granted non-exclusive, non-transferable right to access and read the text of this e-book on-screen. No part of this text may be reproduced, transmitted, downloaded, decompiled, reverse engineered, or stored in or introduced into any information storage and retrieval system, in any form or by any means, whether electronic or mechanical, now known or hereinafter invented, without the express written permission of HarperCollins.

      Ebook Edition © 2014 ISBN: 9780007585458

      Version: 2014-08-19

      Table of Contents

       Cover

       Title Page

      Copyright

      Prologue: What the Dickens?

      1. One Man’s Treasure

      2. Tipping the Scales

3. Melting Moments

4. Honey and Spice

       5. Breaking the Ice

       6. A Bit of Christmas Relish

       7. Not Just for Christmas

      8. Footsteps in the Snow

      9. Slightly Cracked

      10. A Kitten too Far

      11. The Cinderella Dress

       Read on for a first look at Trisha’s brand new novel Creature Comforts …

      About the Author

      By the same author

       About the Publisher

       Prologue:

       What the Dickens?

       Bestselling novelist Trisha Ashley on forging her own Christmas traditions.

      As always, Christmas seems to hover tantalisingly on the horizon for ages like an unattainable mirage and then, when we glance away, suddenly rushes up and takes us by surprise. Thrown into utter panic and urged on to an insane level of consumerism by a barrage of advertising, we shop as if we were about to pull up the siege drawbridge for a month.

      And of course there’s a sudden rash of books and articles promising to show you how to create a stress-free and perfect Christmas, an immaculate concept with the decorations themed to the latest colour scheme, the swags hanging neatly from the staircase and mantelpiece and, above all, a festively dressed table groaning under the weight of a beautifully crisped turkey with all the trimmings, to be followed by Christmas pudding, Christmas cake and all the rest of it. Only by absorbing such seasonal advice, the authors seem to be implying, can you be sure of a happy Christmas … except for the person running his or herself ragged attempting to produce all this perfection, of course.

      And this supposedly ‘traditional Christmas’ with all the extravagant trimmings is not what most of us grew up with. The decorations of my Lancashire childhood were a bright chaos of paper chains, garlands and clusters of balloons, the crackers were cheap and cheerful and the table decoration a couple of pine cones and some holly enthusiastically daubed with silver glitter. The turkey, a monster, would have gone into the oven around midnight on Christmas Eve and have been slowly roasting ever since, though the pork sausages that had followed the stuffing into the cavity would be removed and cooked for breakfast. The dinner itself was quite leisurely: we ate when it was ready and no one thought to add extra work by putting chestnuts into the Brussels sprouts, or anything fancy of that nature. Any slight deficiencies in the cooking, such as slightly overdone sprouts, say, were overlooked: what did it matter? Covered in my mother’s thick, tasty gravy made from the juices in the roasting tin, it was all delicious anyway!

      You can see Holly, the heroine of one of my novels, The Twelve Days of Christmas, preparing and cooking for just such a Christmas feast and she has it all well in hand by the day itself. And when I got married, for the first few years I too produced the kind of Christmas I’d been brought up to expect, with roast turkey, cake, pudding, trifle and mincepies … but always in a laid-back manner. I mean, if the legs drop off the turkey as you take it out of the oven, it’s a pretty good sign it’s cooked, isn’t it? And if you don’t have a set time for Christmas dinner, then it’s ready when it’s ready. And remember, there will be no Christmas police checking that the crackers match the tablecloth and decorations, that there are chestnuts in your stuffing and you’ve bought a hideously expensive but trendy kind of Christmas pudding, or even popping back later to ensure you’re all watching the latest Dickens TV adaptation: God Bless Tiny Tim … again.

      But as the years passed, I began to change the Christmas traditions to suit myself, mixing old and new and forging our own way of doing things. For instance, none of us were mad about turkey, but we all loved roast duck – so now we have a Christmas quacker, with delicious potatoes roasted in the fat and petits pois. This is followed by profiteroles with chocolate sauce. We do have Christmas pudding – but on Boxing Day, when we are not quite so stuffed full and can appreciate it more.

      I make my Christmas cake in November, to the same rich fruit cake recipe (which you can find at the back of my novel Wedding Tiers) I use for most celebration cakes, though using dark rum instead of sherry. Then I marzipan and ice it, before adding a polar bear cunningly poised on a snowy hummock, ready to leap onto a jolly and unsuspecting Father Christmas, who is waving at an oversized reindeer. Behind this little group are three bristly green bonsai pine trees and a giant robin. A fringed red, green and silver paper band is wrapped around it, secured with a dab of icing.

      Nearer Christmas I’ll bake a ham and a few mincepies – but a lot more of the yummy mincemeat flapjacks I devised a few years ago, when pondering what to do with the inevitable bit of mincemeat left at the bottom of the jar.

      There’s a large trifle to create, too, in the cut-glass bowl with a