Cherry and ginger fudge: the perfect last-minute Christmas gift

I wish I were someone who was organised and neat, someone who excelled at making organised and neat lists, and then methodically ticking off each item on completion. But that will never be me.

And that is why, despite my best efforts, I found myself in Newcastle on a rainy Northumberland Street one year trying to decide whether I should spend £15 on a jar of pork scratchings for my father, or just scratch my own eyes out and be done with it.

I then queued for 35 minutes, gritting my teeth, bookended by, on one side, the (incomprehensibly but seemingly happy) father and daughter in front of me, battling with batons of wrapping paper, held topically aloft like lightsabers, and behind me a woman who smashed so many baubles during our time together, I can only assume she was juggling them. It is the sort of Christmas diorama that would be humorous if you weren’t locked inside it, so invested in your place in the queue, the time you have already ploughed into this dystopian shopping experience, that you’d give up your first born before you’d leave.

By the time I had reached the checkouts, and paid the premium for daring to shop in the month in which Christmas falls, I was so emotionally wrung out that I accidentally spent £13 on cheese.

But there is another answer.

An answer that allows you to leave things until the last minute, that dreaded-Christmas-Eve-last-minute. An answer which doesn’t require you to brave the high street, queue in department stores, or fake a smile every time a faux lightsaber knocks you in the face, and, thank God, doesn’t involve being organised or neat or making a list (let alone checking it twice). And yet, it will present you to the world as if you are, in fact, all of these things: the sort of competent woman who handmakes her Christmas presents, wraps them beautifully, and would never take out her frustration on a large piece of Époisses.