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!

I'm never sewing in a straight line again!

I've been working on projects from Julie Fei-Fan Balzer's It's Sew Easy class again. I loved making these projects so much that my title is what I said to my other half as I was sewing away with a big smile on my face. Free-motion sewing is so much fun!

These are quilted ATCs which included birds from Digital Collage Sheets, which I transferred onto the fabric by printing them onto an inkjet transparency and using a gel medium. It's such a great technique. I stamped on my favourite feather stamp and them painted on the branches and blossoms before going crazy with the quilting!

I was so pleased with how the design how turned out that I didn't want to cover it up with text and so I printed my text onto vellum and then sewed each word on and finished the blossoms with some beads.
I've got a Dylon fabric pen which is almost the same colour as the sky blue and so I've written the bible verses where the text comes from onto each ATC, but it's quite subtle in the background.

Here's another play with free-motion sewing on a scrapbook page. - Love this!

Guest at Scrap Revolution

This month I'm the guest designer at Scrap Revolution's blog. Here's a sneaky peek of the layout and card that's already on there...

And here's a peek at the project soon to be appearing...

Check out all the details here

Crafting around the edges

A popular theme for crafty blog posts is WOYWW (or "What's On Your Workdesk Wednesday") and so this post should probably be titled WOYLFT (or"What's On Your Lounge Floor Thursday"). This shows an update on how the big quilt I'm working on is coming along. I've sewn all the diamonds onto papers (nearly 800) and so now I can start stitching them together.

My lounge floor...

This is a great example of "crafting around the edges" which is how I get anything done. Most of my time is spent looking after my three kids and the general tidying, cooking and washing that accompanies that but I squeeze in crafting whenever I can. I have this basket of sewing so I can stitch a few diamonds together given a spare half an hour. I organise my photos into scrapbook kits with coordinated papers and embellishments and sometimes a sketch too, so that I can whip a page up if I find a spare hour. I also have sketch books for jotting down ideas as I find I have quite a bit of thinking time in the day but not a lot of sitting at my desk. Now the kids are getting a bit older they like to sit next to me and create alongside me. I've now introduced the girls to Fimo, so I can play along with them - they particularly like winding the handle on the pasta machine for me!

Do you have any top tips for squeezing in crafting into your day?

A complete album

Today I can show you a whole album! I've finished my album from Donna Downey's London workshop "Gotta Love the Everyday" and so here it is. I've included the painty pages I showed you yesterday to show how the album looks together. The painty pages don't look quite a vibrant in these pictures as they are sitting in their page protectors, but it gives you the idea of how the colours of the next pages peek through the page protectors.

I learnt lots of new techniques in this album and my favourite was using the gel medium for the first time. I've been playing with it again today making image transfers, but more on that on another day.

Here's the finished album...

Hope you made it down this far! Thanks for looking at my colourful, painty creation!

Two projects in one

I've been trying to catch up with the techniques in Julie's "It's Sew Easy" class but I've also been aware of all the other projects waiting to be finished. I was particularly keen to finish off my album I started at Donna Downey's workshops in London a few weeks ago. We had worked on the canvas pages on the day but there were several paper pages waiting to be decorated. I decided to put the two projects together and use Julie's fantastic techniques as backgrounds for my pages.

The pages at the top show the tag techniques from the sewing class, and below shows the completed pages in the album. (Click on the pictures to get a closer look)

Julie also showed us mono-printing techniques and I had a fun time getting really painty making these pages - you'll notice a bit of free-motion sewing creeping in too!

I'll show you the rest of the canvas album tomorrow...

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!