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!