Originally published by The Clifton Courier, December 4

I started making these bickies on a Friday night while I was waiting for an ill-fated pav to cook.

I had an open bottle of red wine, was home alone and was free to take over the kitchen, so I decided to make the most of it. I also had my laptop open to jot down notes about what I was doing. A few weeks have passed and I’m now ready to turn those garbled letters into some form of recipe-like piece of writing.

I do ask for your patience, because the notes from that evening look like of like the script for a slam poetry performance, so stitching it together into something coherent took a bit of work.

Step one: Make a pavlova that calls for the use of four egg whites, saving the four yolks in a container for later. Ensure you a wearing an apron tied up around your middle and Nora Jones is playing in the background, to make this a classy affair.

Step two: Pour yourself a glass of wine and sip until you find yourself in the Christmas spirit, despite it being mid November.

Step three: Research what to do with leftover yolks and decide the sugar cookies you’ve seen pop up a few times in the search results seem easy enough to replicate.

Step four: Decide to go four-wheel-driving in the kitchen. You’re not going to need a map to get where you’re going; all you need is your gut instinct and few ingredients from your housemates’ shelf in the pantry.

Step five: Open the fridge and see you only have a little bit of butter left. Decide to use three heaped tablespoons of your own salted butter, leaving a little left for your toast the following morning. Then take two heaped tablespoons of your housemates’ tubbed “extra soft butter” which apparently has 25 per cent less fat (and 75 per cent less soul) than the normal stuff. Cream in a food processor with three quarters of a cup of brown sugar, stopping every now and then for wine sips and to scrape down the sides of the bowl.

Step six: Add in a few drops of vanilla essence and then blend again.

Step seven: Add the four egg yolks and chuckle to yourself just as Nora sings “my poor heart” in Turn Me Turn and the tie around the middle of your apron comes off. These aren’t heart-smart bickies. Beat again.

Step eight: Have a taste and loudly declare “holy… sheet, that is reeeeeally bloody good” in your outside voice.

Step nine: Add two tablespoons of peanut butter. I used the natural kind, which has only peanuts on its ingredients list (not sure if a list with just one item qualifies as a list, but whatever) as it’s what my housemates had in the pantry. Add a quarter of a cup of salted peanuts and blitz.

Step 10: Notice how chunky the mixture is and sing “hey there chunky boi” in the same tune as Georgy Girl. Yeah, you’ve moved on to your second glass of bad, bad wine and you woke up at 4am. You’re a little tipsy right now.

Step 11: Add one cup of cup of rye flour and a quarter of a cup of oats, another quarter of a cup of salted peanuts and blend.

Step 12: Put on Mariah Carey’s All I want for Christmas is You. Again, you have had wine and no dinner.

Step 13: See the mixture is pretty claggy, so melt another tablespoon of the imposter butter and knead through, using just one hand so you can still sip from your glass with out getting gunk on it.

Step 14: Decide you want there to be a bit of fluff to these boys, so add half a teaspoon of baking soda. Now, I’m certain I added a small amount of self-raising flour here, but that’s missing from my notes. I’m going to take a punt and say I added a third of a cup, because the measurement cup was already dirty.

Step 15: Knead again, moistening further with a teaspoon of the imitation butter, which melted a little because you left it on the bench on a warm summer’s night.

Step 16: Skip the Mariah Carey playlist to Hero and belt out your highest notes while you roll the peanut gunge into ball and place them on a tray. Flatten them slightly with the back of a fork.

Step 17: Put in a moderate oven for 16 minutes, rotating the trays about seven minutes in.

Step 18: Eat the tiny tester bickie you made specifically to sample straight out of the oven with the last of your wine while watching a Netflix Christmas movie. I went with Let It Snow, but there are many, many underwhelming Christmas movies you could go with instead. You can’t work out if it’s good or not yet, but you don’t hate it and that’s good enough for you at this point in your life.