Last day, folks! It’s been another great week and thank you all for playing along. My Day 7 contribution is a joint John/Sarah effort, as John’s is today. John’s holding the camera and you’ll see me with its remote, which is many times the size of the one for my D80, crouching by the girls’ high chairs after dinner, talking to my nieces. Meanwhile Anya bites me with her two very sharp teeth and her sister and father do nothing to help me.

Today was day 3 of Christmas for us, with a visit from John, Sam and the babies. We all had a lot of fun and we’ve sent them home again with a variety of new noisy, shiny toys. Tomorrow I’m looking forward to doing very little and not wearing any degree of posh clothes. I might still wear my dangly snowman earrings though.

Yes, boys and girls, you too could have a hot pink Christmas tree with its own falling polystyrene snow. I’m guessing this isn’t really intended for households with babies or kittens … or taste.

You mix up quite a stiff dough, which is then piped from a bag with a star nozzle into hot oil to fry. It took me two hands to squeeze the dough, so I had a sous chef to cut the lengths. This sous chef was getting kicked out of the house in the evening though, hence the need to reheat churros. By undercooking the sticks the first time, reheating them in hot oil in the evening worked well at finishing them off and making them crisp and warm. But serving them completely fresh is still absolutely the best way to do it … and Suzy has a very particular time for eating them too.

I served the warm chocolate sauce in individual tea cups, with a little pile of churros on the saucer. Then I brought in the big bowl of all the rest of the churros and my guests proclaimed their love for me.

It turns out that at some point during the evening, while I was doing something – probably with cheese – in the kitchen, the other three used my laptop to order tickets for my birthday present and then deleted their browsing history to cover their tracks. Just like we used to do at school.

For the record, they are not in the process of secret booking in the photo above. They were much stealthier than that. Anyway, the tickets are for kick-ass seats for us all at Cirque du Soleil in London in January. And here is where I attempt some kind of segue from hoping we don’t have to join in the acrobatics to talking about how the end of our evening turned into a ridiculously silly dance party to cheesy Mexican party music. I’d bought a bunch of tracks on iTunes to entertain my guests while I was in the kitchen, but didn’t remember them until the end of the meal. What the hell, we thought, let’s put them on now … and let’s have Suzy teach us to samba, fail at that and generally arse about. The next day I could barely walk, but it was a lot of fun.

Here’s the grand finale video:

There was a slightly obscure reason I had chosen the cow over the pig also on offer. I shall explain. I used not to exactly know what a moot point was. It was alright if someone else used the phrase in conversation – my eyes didn’t glaze over too obviously or anything, but I didn’t know how to use the phrase accurately myself. Until I saw this and it all clicked:

Ever since then, a moo point has been part of not just my vocabulary, but also that of everyone around me who has to put up with me labelling anything relevant a moo point. So I thought it only right to own a cow as official mascot for The Moo Point. Her name is Cathy.

Sometimes quesadillas are made by folding the circular tortilla in half, with the filling in the middle, but I did mine with two whole tortillas stacked with the filling in middle. They fit nicely on a baking sheet, so I cooked them in an oven rather than a frying pan. Plus, the more hands-free approach enabled me to get on with sprinkling more cheese on the kitchen floor.

I wanted to offer two different fillings, so gave everyone a quarter of a two quesadillas – one had chorizo and pine nuts with cheddar and feta and the other had mushroom, red onion and cheddar. I also made potato wedges with a sprinkling of ground cumin in the olive oil in which they were coated.

Here’s the judgement video:

Having already told you a little about the preparation I did for my Come Dine With Me evening, you know that I was getting ready for a Mexican evening. And that is why, when my guests turned up, I answered the door to them wearing my embroidered top from Ecuador and one of the four sombreros I’d ordered online. Each guest was then presented with their own sombrero as a party favour and was touchingly delighted with being given a stupid hat to wear.

I was able to borrow three margarita glasses from my Aunty Ann. There used to be four, but clearly there was a party that got Wild one night and now there are three. The glasses sat in my office for a while before the dinner party, along with a bunch of other clues as to the night’s theme such as a printout of the Wahaca menu, a Mexican cookery book and of course there was also the pile of avocados and limes in the fridge.

The pico de gallo and guacamole were pretty much the Pioneer Woman’s recipes, just a bunch of stuff chopped up and put in a bowl to look pretty. I served these as an accompaniment to tortilla chips while I put the starters together in the kitchen. If I’d been in the same room as the tortilla chips not a lot would have been accomplished other than perhaps self-inflicted dehydration as I finished the whole bag without sharing.

The first dish was tostadas – one with a base of shredded chicken and one with a base of refried beans. By the time I’d got to the end of just preparing the starter I’d already turned the kitchen into a bomb site, hence the floor being the only space for a photograph of the plated food. I suppose it wasn’t until I was into the main course that I started spreading cheese onto the floor too. I keep campaigning for a Kitchen Dog to take care of dropped food, but none is forthcoming. Still, Christmas is just around the corner …

Here’s the video from the guests:

Except it turns out that now I’m going to have to adapt the little speech I give when someone asks me what I do, because for the past five weeks, Hubert’s single “Brenna tuats guat” (It Burns Well) has been number one in the Austrian single charts. Artists such as the aforementioned Lady Gaga, or Adele can, for the time being, suck it. The new album quickly reached number two and has remained in the top 5 for weeks, with both the album and single being awarded gold.

The song – I was going to say “geht um”, but I’m back in England now and can stop trying to constantly formulate sentences in German in my head, as I was doing last week – is about the contemporary issues of the financial crisis and Hubert’s objection to the burning of foodstuff for fuel. “Everyone knows that money doesn’t grow on trees and neither can you eat it, but it burns really well” he sings, “but we stoke up the wheat, the turnips and the maize and if we keep on stoking, it’ll all go to hell”.

(Also on Youtube)

For dessert Helen produced a picture-perfect dish of baklava. Seriously, look at it and its beautiful goldenness. Among the layers of syrup-soaked film pastry were piles of chopped nuts and we had Greek yoghurt to drizzle on our servings. This was my first taste of baklava and writing about it now makes me want to head over to Helen’s house again and see if she’ll make me any more today.

A box of Turkish Delight was produced after dinner, which is what everyone is variously inserting into their faces or dropping on each other in the judgement video. But quite where my left earring was hiding at that moment, I do not know: