It's beginning to smell a lot like Christmas...

At Christmas markets I often linger over the decorations made with dried citrus, cinnamon sticks and pine cones but tend to move on when I spot the prices. It was with some delight, therefore, that I spotted a 'recipe' for making my own dried orange slices in a magazine I was given last Christmas.

Eleven and a bit months later, I finally got to give it a go. Not that it was really that difficult and I'm sure, with a bit of experimentation, I could have sussed out the recipe myself. Mind you, it's nice to embark on a project you have some level of confidence will turn out as you expect, especially one that takes a few hours, as this one does.

So, if you fancy giving it a go, this is what you do.

Take 2 large oranges and a lemon and cut into 5mm slices. Place them in a single layer between a few sheets of kitchen paper to remove the excess juice, then lay out onto a couple of wire cooling racks - the sort you use to cool cakes on.

Place the racks and slices of citrus into a pre-heated oven - 90C or 70C fan - for 4 hours, turning the slices halfway through the drying time.

Into the oven they go....

Out of the oven they come...

Having been collecting pine cones all year, I decided to use some of the dried citrus slices to make some festive pot pourri. To adorn these bowls, I also made some clementine peel stars. To make these, carefully peel a couple of clementines. Choose 'easy peelers' and try to remove the peel in large pieces. Take a small star cookie cutter measuring 1-2 cm across, and punch stars from the clementine peel. Add these to the wire racks in the oven for the final 2 hours.

For the hours that the slices and stars were in the oven, the house was awash with the aroma of citrus, which really put me in a Christmassy mood and ready to plan what else I needed to complete this crafty gift.

The next step involved a trip to my local Indian supermarket - apparently the largest supplier of ethnic foods and spices in the South West of the UK and pretty fabulous it is too! Here I stocked up on those quintessential Christmas spices of cinnamon, star anise and cloves. I also dug out a can of gold spray paint and applied it to a few of the smaller pine cones for an element of festive sparkle.

Today I have enjoyed assembling all these ingredients into festive packages.

There's a slight irony in my gift giving in that some of the recipients live in the countryside and so probably have their own supply of pine cones, however, I've decided that's not the point! I just hope the recipients enjoy the festive scents as much as I do.