Recipes for The Twelve Days of Christmas - Lavender and Lovage (2024)

Recipes for The Twelve Days of Christmas – I’m celebrating the Twelve Days of Christmasstill, and would like to share some of my favourite recipes here. From fabulous leftovers to festive cakes and tarts, I hope you will embrace the season as I am – with age-old traditions and deliciousfood, as Christmas is not over just yet!

Happy New Year to all my readers! I hope you brought in the New Year with family and friends and had a great time. After a wonderful Christmas Eve, Christmas Day and Boxing Day, it was just the two of us on New Year’s Eve, in our PJ’s with a bottle of wine, a running buffet throughout the evening and the telly! We DID manage to stay up until Midnight, and enjoyed watching the spectacular fireworks from London, before crawling off to bed in the early minutes of the New Year. 2018 was a year of highs and terrible lows – I lost my mum after she suffered a major stroke, and I’m still reeling from her passing. With both parents gone now, I feel very lonely and have yet to adjust to being an “adult orphan”. I went on some amazing press trips all over the world, from South Africa, Canada and Asia, to the West Indies and the UK. I’ve still got to share some of my stories with you from my trips, so do keep popping back to read all about my adventures, as well about all the fabulous food I ate too.

As well as travelling the world, I was also very busy working with some great UK brands developing and creating recipes with them.From quick pickles and handy (and healthy) ready-made soups to local Welsh produce and dreamy, creamy dessertsto healthy breakfast pancakes, it was a year of some really fabulous brand collaborations. And then I published my first solo book! After many years of writing notes and collecting recipes, my first book “Lavender & Lovage: A Culinary Notebook of Memories & Recipes From Home & Abroad” was published in November 2018. It’s a big book, over 400 pages, with 160 recipes and lots of photos – all styled and taken by me. I’ve been very humbled to see lots of positive reviews posted on Amazon and on many food blogs, with one review from Josceline Dimbleby (shared below) being the icing on the cake, as she is one of my favourite food and travel writers and is a fellow member of The Guild of Food Writers.

‘Packed with evocative memories of Karen’s much travelled and multi-faceted life, an exciting variety of mouth watering dishes inspired by that life, fascinating snippets of factual and historical information, and the visual treat of her beautiful photographs to bring it all alive – this book has everything. A real treasure trove!’
Josceline Dimbleby

I have no idea what 2019 has in store for me and my family, but I’m hoping it is more hopeful and happier than 2018.And, as I like to celebrate Christmas in the old and traditional way of the Twelve Days of Christmas, right up to Twelfth Night and Epiphany, I’d like to share some seasonal recipes with you today, with some leftovers recipes added for good measure. I wish you a very happy, healthy and hopeful New Year, and thank you for sticking with me here, through thick and thin! Do keep popping back to see all of my new recipes, travel stories and thoughts, and if you fancy following me on social media, then I’ll share the links below for ease. Please DON’T be shy, if you read my blog regularly, or have just discoveredit, do leave a comment below and introduce yourself, all the best for 2019, Karen