Friends for Christmas!

What is a christmas without friends?

You guys may know that FtAshion is by 2 friends who met at work, and now 1 in Sweden and 1 in Singapore. Having started this blog, we had shared with our friends (many from our work) and received great support! Thank you guys!

Our friend Etoiles is very excited about our blog and wanted to share the joy of Christmas with us!

Christmas is magical and enchanting to me.
Beautiful decorations along the streets, merry carols especially the Oldies & Jazzy kinds.
I love meeting up with my friends and exchange little gifts.

When time permits, I like to enhance gifts I get from shopping malls with some DIY stuffs like small handicraft items or homemade baked products!

Some time ago, I saw a recipe on Green Tea Tarts. I decided to make my own vegetarian version. So here're my Red Bean Green Tea Tarts!

I did not manage to capture shots of making of my tarts but basically, they are tart cases made with short crust pastry, filled with custard (custard powder, sugar, milk) flavoured with baking green tea powder and finally, topped up with sweet red beans which I boiled for a very long time with rock sugar, pandan (screwpine) leaves, thickened with a bit of corn starch for extra mouthfeel :)

Doesn't seem very Christmas? I love them for their "Christmas" colours - Red & Green. Personally, I love the marriage of Green tea ice cream and sweet red beans at Japanese restaurants! Hee hee!

I enjoyed having my tarts with my friends at my home that evening, exchanging my tarts for homemade Gingerbread bears by my Godma and sharing them with my parents-in-law.

Last but not least, I managed to bring some of these tarts to my Mom just before she left town! :)

Despite having room for improvement, like what my Godma said, homemade stuffs are the ones with character and they surely contain lots of LOVE, especially for special occassions like Christmas!

Merry Christmas to everyone!

Love, Etoiles (Singapore)