I have been suffering from early onset Christmas-itis of late. The are numerous symptoms: listening to Christmas music; obsessively pinning on my Pinterest Christmas board, making ornaments and, this is clearly an advanced case, making not one but two gingerbread houses last weekend. Most, if not all, of these symptoms can be attributed to the fact that I have been creating seasonal recipes and features for other websites which have put me in a premature Christmassy mood. The symptoms have spread to the children – they had to decorate a gingerbread house with their friends – and now we are watching Frosty the Snowman and the Muppet Christmas Carol around the clock. I wonder if we have peaked a little early this year!

I was making a Pavlova for one of my freelance recipe gigs and I had some leftover meringue from doing the step photos and plenty of gingerbread biscuits from the other recipe so of course I had to put the two together… It is a marriage made in heaven! So good, so easy and the meringues can be made in advance and given out as gifts too… I would like to thank Green & Blacks for supplying some of their fantastic chocolate for me to play with – receiving chocolate in the post is definitely one of my favourite things!

I used Biscoff spread folded in the whipped cream (that stuff is hugely addictive!) but if you can’t find any blitz 6 gingerbread or digestive biscuits until you have very fine crumbs and fold 3 tablespoons in the cream instead (reserve some to sprinkle on top as well). I think this would work really well with crunchy peanut butter instead of Biscoff.