Rainy day cakes

Sunday was a washout weather-wise, so we retreated to our cosy kitchen and made something yummy and sunny-looking. We based our baking, rather loosely, on a recipe for gluten-free and dairy-free cupcakes that I'd previously found on the internet. We began by hauling out all the necessary ingredients, and then my children's challenge was to sort them into two groups - wet and dry -  while I set the oven to heat up to 180c.

Ingredients:

Dry:

125g gluten-free flour

60g ground almonds

1 tsp baking  powder

half tsp bicarbonate of soda

30g unrefined sugar

half tsp cinnamon

pinch of salt

zest of 1 clementine

Wet: 

3 eggs

100ml olive oil

juice of 2 clementines

1 medium carrot, finely grated (add just before baking)

I let my children measure out the ingredients into two bowls by themselves; one for the wet, and another for the dry. Of course, this all got very messy - but that's half the fun, right?

They combined the wet ingredients with the dry, and then stirred in the grated carrot. Having counted out twelve paper cases, they spooned some of the mixture into each (about 1 tablespoon per cake). We found we had enough to make fourteen cupcakes in the end.

After baking them in the oven for about 12 minutes, we let the cakes cool on a rack for an hour before smothering them in icing and adding a final and delicious flourish - fresh raspberries and blueberries. Suddenly, our Sunday was looking a lot more cheery. 

Back-to-school baking

It's the last day of the summer holidays for my children. With a rainy, windy and decidedly autumnal morning we had the perfect conditions for a spot of back-to-school baking in our cosy kitchen.

We made Banana Cake as it's ideal for the children's packed lunches. We've had to sample its moist, fruity deliciousness already of course. In fact, I hope there's a slice or two left for Buddy and Daisy to actually take with them to school tomorrow.

Ingredients

3 ripe bananas

150g soft dark sugar

100g butter

300g plain flour

2 lightly beaten eggs

2 handfuls of raisins

2 handfuls of chopped dried apricots

2 tsps baking powder

half tsp of bicarbonate of soda

100 ml olive oil

1. Pre-heat the oven to 180c/gas mark 4/355F

2. Butter a 900g loaf tin and line with baking parchment

3. Peel and mash the bananas

4. Mix the sugar and butter together until fluffy

5. Add the bananas and dried fruit

6. Sift the flour, baking powder and bicarb into the banana mix

7. Add the eggs, beating well

8. Lastly, add the oil and give everything a good stir

9. Pour the mixture into the loaf tin and bake for 1 hour. Cover the cake with baking parchment 30 minutes into the cooking time to prevent the top from scorching

10. When ready, remove the cake from its tin, place it on a wire rack and - if you can resist its charms - allow it to cool before slicing

Have a great Autumn Term everyone.

Sweetheart biscuit baking

My five year old says, 'Valentine's Day is when you can love the people you love even more.'

Last Valentine's Day we made these scrumptious sweetheart jammie dodger biscuits; they certainly went down a treat, knocking spots off the shop-bought variety. And they were amusingly large due to the big cookie cutter that was randomly selected to make them.

To make these lovely sweetheart biscuits (based on Annabel Karmel's recipe)

You will need:

A batch of chilled basic biscuit dough, made with approx 300g plain flour

1/2 jar of jam

90g icing sugar

60g soft butter

1 tsp water

1/2 tsp vanilla essence

How to make them:

1) Heat the oven to 180c.

2) Roll dough to about 5mm thick.

3) Cut out circles with a 6cm cutter (or larger for giant biscuits) and arrange on a lined baking tray.

5) Cut hearts from half the biscuit circles. We made our cutter by folding a 6cm strip of card into a heart shape and fastening with sticky tape.

6) Cook the biscuits for about 12 minutes or until golden and then leave to cool.

7) Make the butter icing by beating together the remaining ingredients - except for the jam.

8) Spread the butter icing over just the whole (not the hole) biscuits.

9) Drop a dollop of jam on top of the icing and then place the heart biscuits on top.

10) Dust with icing sugar for a final flourish.

A delicious way to show the people you love just how much you love them - especially if, like us, you scale up those traditional dodger dimensions!

Festive fare

This weekend Daisy suggested we make something sweet and Christmassy, so we decided to make the most festive of fare - mince pies. We flicked through our cookbooks and scaled down the quantities of ingredients because unlike so many recipes suggested we didn't want to bake three dozen. It was our first attempt after all.

In the end we opted for Delia's shortcrust pastry recipe.

4oz plain flour

1oz butter

1oz lard

2 tablespoons ice cold water

a pinch of salt

After the pastry rested in the fridge for half an hour we made the pastry cases and filled each with a tablespoon of mincemeat; shop bought, but good quality.

Inspired by Nigella, Daisy wanted to make star-topped pies. This was great because I could leave her to it as she happily cut out and transferred all the pastry shapes.

25 minutes in the oven at 200c and our nine little mincemeat morsels were ready. Once cooled, we dusted them with a little snow - icing sugar shaken through a mini sieve. Daisy loved doing that almost as much as tasting her own baking and between us all the pies disappeared incredibly quickly. Now I see why all those recipes are for batches of three dozen; we'll certainly be scaling up next time.

Umbrella breakfasts & teatime treats

One rainy morning during the summer holidays Buddy came up with an excellent if ambitious idea for an indoor activity. I remember being very surprised at his plan; he was determined that we make our very own home-baked crumpets - from scratch.

Although we eat plenty of the shop-bought variety as pictured above (Buddy has arranged his into breakfast umbrellas here), I had never before thought of actually baking these bubbly wonders. I was delighted when Delia came up trumps with a simple recipe in her Complete Illustrated Cookery Course. Plus it required a very short list of ingredients - perfect.

We had to tweak the recipe slightly, due to our shortage of dried yeast and lack of egg rings - egg rings!? What the heck? as Daisy would say. But we still managed to successfully produce a batch of 10 delicious crumpets with our slightly reduced quantities of ingredients and improvised egg rings - metal cookie cutters. We have since tried making novelty crumpets using our dog and rabbit shaped cutters, but returned to simple circles after severing one too many peripheral crumpet-parts.

Ingredients

250 ml milk

50 ml water

1 teaspoon caster sugar

7g (1 sachet) dried yeast

200g plain flour

level teaspoon salt

butter, for greasing

Equipment

a non-stick frying pan

metal cookie cutters

Served warm with butter, cream cheese, jam or marmite, these home-made classics get the double thumbs-up from Bud - high praise indeed. They don't stay fresh as long as shop-bought crumpets, a maximum of three days in an air tight container, but they freeze pretty well. Ask a couple of friends over for a teatime treat and you may not need to store or freeze - it's quite possible to polish off the whole batch in one delicious sitting. Enjoy.

Cooking club

Eeek! Has it really been over a month since my last post? Well, I'm back; my computer is fixed (finally) and essential software is being reinstalled (slowly).

I've missed being here.

The summer holidays are fast becoming a rosy blur of home adventures and days out, camping trips and family gatherings, but I will endeavour to report on a few of these before September is out.

Today I write about an activity Daisy initiated when just the two of us were at home. By the way, she has recently started using the word activity herself, for which read I don't want to play on my own now mummy. Let's make a mess/noise/thing together.

It began after watching the Cbeebies programme I Can Cook. I am quite a fan, despite its irritating use of canned children's laughter throughout. This particular show featured how to make fresh fruit flapjacks and as it finished Daisy's let's make them now request enabled us to immediately 'switch off the television set and go and do something less boring instead', Why Don't You style.

Daisy insisted that for our activity we play the I Can Cook game whereby I was the presenter Katy and she was one of the children in the TV cooking club. So we followed the format of the show; we washed our hands with 'slippy-dippy' soap, put on aprons, sang about what we were doing, 'tickled' the ingredients and tried to remember the song at the end. Daisy even washed up afterwards because 'you have to put things away, to use another day', or something.

The recipe needed a bit of tweaking - mainly due to our slightly large loaf tin - but all in all the results were very pleasing. Not a fresh fruit flapjack at all really; more a crumble slice. But delicious nonetheless. What I really liked about it was that we made just four crumble slices and the ingredients for this modest amount were easily manageable for Daisy to mix, tip and 'tickle'. It also meant that a few days later, when Nana visited and we needed a quick pudding, Daisy stepped up and happily made another mini batch which we served warm with custard and cream - well, it was Sunday lunch.

It made me realise that when I'm baking at home with the children I rarely give each of them a little set up of their own; their own bowl, their own ingredients and so on (with the exception of homemade pizza) and I plan to experiment with this more in the future.

While I'm a big fan of the communal cooking experience - just look at these gorgeous fairy cakes we made together for Amelia's birthday, for example - individual parallel cooking at home can provide a fabulously fun cooking club atmosphere. And without that awful TV canned laughter.

Blazing June

Summer's here at last! For me, June means Wimbledon (yay), cherries and strawberries (yum), and playing outside until bedtime. It also brings village and school summer fairs aplenty; an abundance of bunting, bouncy castles and barbecues.

But I haven't had much time to write about these June adventures. A casualty of my husband currently being off in far away lands maybe? Too busy being out and about maybe? Being in sole charge of my two children is full-on and tiring, and fitting work in amongst it all is a juggling game requiring precision timing. We are certainly having fun though. Here with a few highlights of our June thus far.

I spy with my little eye

Buddy spotted the most beautiful beetle on our mini-basil plant. It was like tiny Quality Street sweet. It tolerated intense examination under the magnifying glass for two days and then was gone. Ladybird, Ladybird, fly away home....

Make and bake

We made gingerbread men, well people actually. Daisy was adamant she was going to make a skirt for her gingerbread princess.

They always take great delight in announcing which limb is to be munched first. And with recent knowledge of Alice Through the Looking Glass they call out 'Off with their head!' in shrill ordering tones.

.

The recipe is from a lovely book called Just 4 Kids - with a really simple method and a short list of ingredients including an inspired addition of golden syrup for added chewiness. My two had never tried this before so I let them lick the spoon. It was a little too sweet for Bud's savoury palate but - guess what - Daisy loved it.

Dress-up a go-go

With the lovely weather, I've shifted a lot of their toys to our little outside space.

The dress-up drawer has been relocated to the decking and Daisy has embraced its appearance by stripping off immediately she returns from nursery to transform herself into various outrageous combinations of princess, cat, alien, silver swan and butterfly. I am strictly not allowed to laugh at these though; it has been tough.

Recycling truck

Just before daddy left for his trip to the Far East, he bought a new pair of shoes. Daisy took one look at the shoebox and announced it was to be a lorry. We had great fun raiding the recycling box to make the cab, wheels and windscreen. I got one idea past the Board; a simple fan - made from thin card folded like a concertina - joining the cab to the trailer; articulation in action. Buddy was very keen to fill the shoebox with toys. The toilet roll wheels could barely hold the weight of its load.

Please note the driver; Trucker Barbie. Now that's a marketing opportunity if ever I saw one.

Rainy days and Mondays...

Saturday was a wash-out, wasn't it? And as for Sunday .... even worse. So we stayed in. And had a bit of a baking bonanza.

We baked two dozen or so biscuit bears using an Annabel Karmel cookie recipe, and took our decorative inspiration from Mini Grey's wonderful story, Biscuit Bear. In the past I have chosen the healthy-option for decoration; chopped apricots, raisins, cranberries and fruit-puree 'glue', but this time we went sugar-tastic, it was simply too rainy to be healthy. So our bears were dressed with sugar-strands, silver balls and icing of many colours, just like in the story.

Our biscuits were a little crumbly (melt-in-the-mouth, let's say) and I'm afraid some bears did not make it through this decorating stage. Yes, briefly a few severed bear-heads and limbs lay scattered on the kitchen table. My two children destroyed the evidence of this in a few crafty nibbles, so it never quite resembled the scene of devastation after Bongo the dog shows up in Biscuit Bear - he 'liked biscuits (but not in a way that is necessarily good for the biscuits).'

And so to our banana cake (recipe found a while back in a Guardian freebie booklet called Cooking for Kids) which I had to hastily photograph today before its fruity wonders were polished off. A firm favourite in our family; it makes the house smell divine and convinces us there's wholesome farmhouse goodness in our kitchen for as long as there's an available slice.

We've made it so many times now we've changed its recipe to suit us perfectly. For example, we always add extra banana, apricots and raisins and we reduce the amount of oil by 20ml or so - it's still wonderfully moist. It takes longer to cook than the suggested 45 minutes though - we bake it for at least an hour but turn the oven's temperature to 170C after 45 minutes to prevent the top from scorching.

So, on rainy days (or Mondays), if we're hanging around with nothing to do but frown, we often end up in our oven-warmed kitchen, with Classic FM and some favourite baking recipes to chase away the blues. It works almost every time.