The Old and the New

Having shown you the truly traditional fève, and the secular version of modern tradition, I thought I'd buy our last gâteau from Carrefour, so you could see how the hypermarkets market their gâteau des rois! You're right, this is an Avatar fève. I make no comment. The gâteau was fantastic, though, my favourite type. It's a galette, which just seems to mean flat, buttery cake or biscuit in French, but this galette des rois is made of puff pastry with frangipane inside - ground almonds and sugar and generaly gooey loveliness. I think the crown was best, too.

So that's it for King Cakes for another year! Clever Mrs Cozy Home found me a New Orleans blog with their own version of King Cakes - wonderful to see how French traditions are developed in French-based cultures. I fell asleep on the sofa shortly after sharing the last cake - Son 1 was the one with the candid camera.You can see I was wrapped up against the cold. We have no (and need no) central heating in our well-insulated southern French home, and enjoy the relatively environmentally-friendly heating options of a wood fire and vegetable oil-based burner. But it does mean that wooly jumpers and blankets come out in weather like this!

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The weather has been messing us about recently. Snow was confidently forecast for today, and then didn't come. But by the time the forecast had been revised, the regional council had cancelled all school buses, and many establishments had told their pupils not to turn up. Thus the boys cycled to school in a light dusting of snow this morning only to be told to go home and stay warm, as only two teachers had turned up!

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They followed me around on my teaching day, cheerfully playing on their DS consoles or joining in if the lesson was appropriate to their age. We had fun and they have competently Mind-Mapped the plots of Harry Potter and the Deathly Hallows and The Fellowship of the Ring, which I'm sure is more than they would have done if they'd stayed in their own half-open school.
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There was just a little time for charity shopping between lessons, too. This...

... turned out to look like this, when I pulled it off the shelf! What was it doing in France, anyway? Lovely.

After that I got into browsing French books too...This is an Alpine-style cushion cover. Very wintery.Pretty, pretty edging, but it had that perfection that I associate with machine sewing.Turns out I was wrong, though - every bit of it is hand-stitched. It's only edging which has been torn off a petticoat, but it is wonderful.Some offcuts of Provençal-style oil cloth.And were you admiring my new tablecloth? It wasn't cheap, but it's linen, and it came with three large matching cloths which were described as napkins, although they probably weren't...

Do you like my haul? Son 2 got some Pokémon stuff too, but somehow I didn't think to photo that!Apparently, the snow WILL come tomorrow. We'll see...

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Have a lovely weekend, snowy or sunny according to your latitude! And don't forget to join the Magazine Swap ( on the left) if you want a bit of new reading matter - did you spot the January edition of Country Living next to my somnulent form on our sofa?