Christmas decorations - ice bowls
For sheer chutzpah, you cannot beat an ice bowl for Christmas style, and if you've been smart enough to preserve garden flowers throughout the year, or even have some fresh blooms in the garden or greenhouse, you've can make this for absolutely nothing - free and gratis, from your garden and tap to the applause of your family!
From the garden you may find, in December that you can pick winter jasmine (nudiflorum) and winter clematis flowers, and from the greenhouse you may have geraniums and early freesias. You can harvest cotoneaster berries, hawthorns and rose-hips, ivy leaves, skeletised leaves or Virginia Creeper leaves, both of which look great, and even vegetables! Don't use anything poisonous though.
If this is your first ice bowl, it's best to use fairly bulky plant material, as lightweight stuff will tend to float up to the surface. You can stop this, but it means freezing the bowl in several layers, which can be complicated - berries and large leaves work brilliantly for a trial run and can be frozen in one go.
You need two glass bowls - if you have a set of matching bowls, take out the middle one and use the largest and smallest - alternatively you need to have a 2cm gap between the two bowls for the water, and a jam jar.
Put the jam jar in the small bowl and the small bowl in the larger one, filling the gap with water to about 1cm of the top. Now you need to slip the flowers and leaves into the water, prodding them into place with a chopstick or skewer. If necessary, pour water into the jam jar to hold the inner bowl down. Tape it all into place with masking tape across the top and freeze overnight. Un-stick the bowls by dipping the outer bowl in cold water (warm water will crack it).
Use filled with cold punch, ice-cream or sorbet and put the ice bowl on a rimmed tray to serve so you can catch the drips.
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