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.

Pancake Daisy

Pancake Day in July: this is what comes of allowing a 3 year old to flick through a recipe book just before teatime. We'd talked Daisy out of the milkshakes (p42)and the lollies (p44) but couldn't dissuade her from p8; pancakes it had to be.

She was very keen to help with the cooking. She confidently tapped the eggs hard on the table top and got most of their gooey content into the bowl. And she loved helping me with the electric mixer, still calling the whisks whiskers - which I am loathe to correct.

Our recipe made 10 pancakes. Daisy was initially impressed by my flipping capabilities but when her interest waned (around pancake no. 6) I turned them over with the spatula - less dramatic but more successful.

Pancakes for tea were allowed with the proviso that they should at least be savoury. So once cooled, ham and cream cheese were smothered on top and they were rolled into enchilada-style wraps and served alongside favourite veg.

There were a few left for pudding, so we filled them with slices of banana, grapes and strawberries and added a dusting of cocoa and sugar. These were trickier to eat - it was a cutlery-free meal - but were polished off just the same.

So crazy times in our kitchen then; non-seasonal cooking you might say. But seeing as we had all the ingredients for pancakes in our store cupboard I think we actually followed the traditional custom better than we've managed on many a February Shrove Tuesday. Good one, Daisy.

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.