Christmas cookies in a jar

I love to give handmade gifts at Christmas but sometimes time runs short. This year I saw the idea of making cookies in a jar and thought it would work well - and it did. I made 6 homemade gifts in half an hour! I found this page, which includes recipes and printable tags. I did have to remake the instructions for the jars though as it talked about cup measurements instead of grams or ounces .

We tried a couple of the recipes out first, just to make sure they were nice and these cranberry cookies were our favourite ( we found the Santa cookies a little too sweet).

And for my friend who has a wheat and dairy free diet, I found this recipe here, for chocolate oat cookies, which works perfectly in a jar. She has a wheat free diet, not a gluten free diet, but I think you can get gluten free oats for a gluten free version.

Bake for Books

At the girls' school they are having a fundraising effort to raise money for new books for the school library called Bake for Books. We are having bake sales on occasional Fridays and each year is taking it in turns to host the sale. There is also a competition to see which year can raise the most money - nothing like bringing out the competitive nature of mums!! It was our turn this Friday and I baked loads of cakes and biscuits. I had a go at two new recipes.

The first one was Rainbow Cookies. These were a great recipe for a bake sale as they have to be made the day before and left in the fridge overnight before slicing. I also added to the recipe by adding 100g melted chocolate and sprinkles to one end. The recipe is here. It really does make nearly 4 dozen biscuits!

This was the other recipe I tried - Whoopie Pies! They were yummy and this recipe had melted marshmallows in the middle. They aren't as pretty as the rainbow cookies, but a little icing sugar dusted on the top made them a bit more presentable . The recipe is here. I wouldn't bother with the optional melted chocolate on the top as they are definitely sweet enough.

And the news just in is we have raised over £270 and we are in second place. The total raised so far is over £1000 !

Wednesday Love : Birthday Love

We've had a birthday this week and so as we struggled to emerge from under piles of wrapping paper we had a lively birthday party to attend. The blonde one asked for a pet party this year with Edupet. It was great and the kids got to meet all sorts of animals (rabbits, guinea pigs, mice, hamsters, snakes, lizards, chickens, spiders and chameleons among others and an iguana called Stan).

I saw a rainbow cake on the front cover of Good Food magazine and thought I had to have a go for the party. The recipe is here. I used the Dr Oetker gel colours and used one tube per sponge! The colours still weren't quite as bright as the original picture but worked really well when all put together. The kids were very excited when I cut the cake to reveal the surprise inside. There were some impressed parents at picking-up time too!

Easter baking

The Easter holidays finished yesterday and it's back to school today. I had lots of fun baking over the holidays. My three kids have got to the age when they play together really well and so I end up feeling like I'm at a bit of a loose end. I can't really start any art projects as I know I'll be working on it for about 30 seconds before a little voice next to me says "that's looks like fun - can I do it too?". I decided to get creative in the kitchen instead.

The photo above is my first attempt at hot cross buns. I was so happy that they not only looked like hot cross buns, but tasted like them too! The recipe came from the latest copy of Good Food magazine. It was a good recipe to follow but could have had a lot more fruit in it.

In fact I had so much dried fruit left that I made a tea loaf. It is such an easy recipe and it's so yummy, particularly toasted with butter. I think I have enough fruit left to make another one later this week. You can see from the photo that all the fruit sank to the bottom - oh well, it still tasted nice!

We have soooo many Easter eggs in our house! With 5 people in our family it doesn't take long for there to be a mountain of chocolate after Easter day (16 in total plus extra little goodies!). My favourite thing to do with excess Easter eggs is to chop them up and put them in cookies. My recipe comes from Good Housekeeping's Vegetarian cook book and it has oats in the recipe for added texture.

Then more Easter eggs were turned into brownies with this recipe. Yum! I used milk chocolate instead of dark (as those were the eggs we had left) so these were very sweet. The dark chocolate would have been better - but the kids didn't seem to mind!

More eggs were melted down for these no-bake treats, with rice krispies and digestive biscuits. Another recipe from the Good Food magazine.

Just in case we hadn't had enough sweet treats over the past couple of weeks, we had two birthdays as well!
The first was a Lego batman cake - as requested the day before the birthday. Phew - using my Mum skills I had already bought these Lego batman rice paper cake toppers from Ebay!

A Moshi Monster cake was requested by the ginger one. We looked online for inspiration and saw lots of wonderful complicated looking creations. I went for a Victoria Sandwich cake with Kitkats around the edge and some Moshis on the top. It went down very well with all the girls at her party.

Another bonus of being in a larger family is that I can bake all these treats but I don't get to eat a lot of them! One slice of cake, a hot cross bun and a cookie or two (or three) so I don't have too worry too much about the calories!

Monkey cakes and a mermaid

It's been a busy, fun Easter holiday here, along with two of the small people's birthdays. The Boy decided he wanted a monkey party and so we planned a monkey tea party with family and a couple of friends. The monkey cakes were the main part of the party, along with monkey party hats and plates. I made some fairy cakes which were topped with chocolate ganache, and then the monkey face is made from giant chocolate buttons, white chocolate buttons and choc chips, with an icing pen smile.

The Ginger one decided on a mermaid making party. My friend Pip is a birthday cake genius and helped me come up with the mermaid cake. It's a Victoria sandwich with coloured buttercream icing. I baked part of the cake mix in a greased cereal bowl to make the island shape on the top. Jelly fish sweets are swimming around the sides and icing pens were used for waves and seaweed. The mermaid on the top is my daughter's doll.


Sadly we had to cancel the mermaid making party on the day as the Ginger one woke up poorly, but we will reschedule it for next month sometime. I get to make another mermaid cake but next time I will be using blue roll out icing which has already been coloured. Blue buttercream icing did not work well as it mostly looked grey until I had used over half the bottle of food colouring.

You can see the monkey tea party was a success though!

Mini tiramisu cakes

Oh mini tiramisu cakes, how I love thee and all your yumminess!

I went to a barbeque with friends this week and so I took a tray of these cakes with me. They are so delicious. There were a few left at the end of the evening but some friends took some home for their other halfs to try!

I saw this recipe on "Baking Made Easy" with Lorraine Pascale and they looked so good that I had to try cooking them. I have made them before as the regular muffin size and they were a full on dessert portion. I made them this time as a fairy cake size which was perfect for a sweet treat.

You can find the recipe here.

Malteser cake - the yummiest cake in the whole world

My daughter has named this "the yummiest cake in the whole world" and so I thought I had to share it with you. After Easter we always end up with too much chocolate and I find it hard to fit it into our day to let the kids eat any. They always ask at inappropriate times - such as just before supper or just after breakfast, and so the chocolate sits in a collection for months. My usual way to use it up is my standard choc chip cookie recipe but we had lots of maltesers left from a birthday party this year and so after googling Malteser cake for a while I found this - YUM! The kids then ate a small piece of this with a bowl of strawberries for their pudding. This contains their Maltesers, mini smarties and two and a half buttons easter eggs!

I found the recipe HERE, but I adapted it a bit, so here's my version....

Ingredients

100g unsalted butter
2o0g milk chocolate
4 tbsp golden syrup
3 tbsp granulated sugar
4tbsp cocoa powder
225g Maltesers
225g Digestive biscuits

Mini Smarties

1. Put the butter, the milk chocolate, golden syrup, granulated sugar and cocoa powder together in a pan and melt together over a low heat.

2. Put the digestive biscuits into a plastic bag and crush them up.

3. Mix the digestive biscuits into the melted chocolate mix and then stir in the Maltesers (stir them in as quick as you can as the chocolate melts from the outside of them).

4. Press the mixture into a lined 8" square tin and press the mini smarties onto the top while it's still warm.

5. Leave to set in the fridge (this didn't take too long).

6. When it's set, use the paper to lift it out of the tin. The original recipe cut it into 12 squares but we cut it up much smaller (about 1.5" square or smaller)

7. The cake has lasted for three days in an airtight tin and the maltesers didn't go soft in that time. It's all gone now though!

Tweet tweet

We've had lots of holiday days together and it's been a great chance to spend time as a family and also to catch up on a bit of crafting. I'm taking part in the online class "It's Sew Easy" with Julie Fei-fan Balzer and she has been showing us so many great techniques. Some of the early projects include things that I've done before but working together with new ideas and so I've have customized my own projects to try something new.

This little birdie includes techniques from two of Julie's projects, including customizing the fabric using stamps. The pattern for the bird comes from the book "Little Birds" by the Design Collective. It's a great little book that my mum bought me recently with loads of bird themed projects from lots of different artists.

I'll show you more of my Sew Easy projects tomoorow.

We've had another birthday here too, with a castle cake requested. Here it is complete with cone turrets, a biscuit portcullis and marshmallow battlements. The kids at the party had great fun picking the sweets off!

A birthday weekend

We had a couple of birthdays this weekend and an excuse to eat cake - yum yum! They are both Victoria sandwich cakes with strawberry jam in the middle. The top one was covered in chocolate ganache and topped with strawberries.The bottom one was covered in ready to roll green icing with sugar decorations (bought not made) because my 4 year old has been planning her ladybird and butterfly cake since last October. The addition of the chocolate finger biscuits around the outside of both cakes was inspired by a family tradition from my friend Pip.