February weekend

Finally the sun has come out and the weather feels a little warmer, so Sophie and i ventured out into the garden. I confess i am a fair weather gardener i just hate the cold and wet and would rather stay inside and bake.

Mr Maker came to town

OH lucky Sophie got to meet one of her favourite Cbeebies Stars Mr Maker at our local Hobby craft store.  She was so excited and had been talking about him for days so when the day came to go and see him we left nice and early to get ahead and meet him.

How to make Marshmallows

Sophie and I got busy in the kitchen today making some lovely fluffy squishy tasty marshmallows.

Recipe

100g Cornflour

100g icing sugar

70g tropical juice or any other fruit juice to flavour

50g water

4 egg whites

200g caster sugar

85g liquid glucose

4g gelatine leaves

Slowly whisk egg white, while these are whisking, put the juice in a pan and bring to the boil, then add the water, sugar and glucose.  Bring this to the boil until it reaches 128 c 

 As the temperature rises of the juice syrup mix turn up the egg white till they form medium peaks, once the syrup has reached 128 c pour this very slowly in a thin drizzle into the whisking eggs, make sure you turn up the speed of the whisk to its highest setting, otherwise you could cook the egg whites.

Squeeze out the water in the gelatine leaves and drop these into the egg whites also add a little colouring at this stage and continue whisking at a high setting until the mixture reaches room temperature, this will take a while.

While your waiting for the mixture to whisk and cool measure and sift out the cornflour and icing sugar then get your deep pan coat in a little oil sides and base and sift over with the icing sugar mix.

  turn your mixture out into the pan and even out and cover with more icing sugar and cornflour mixture

 leave the mixture on the side for 1 hour then cover with cling film and leave for 6 hours after this use some of the icing sugar mix and coat a chopping board. ready for turning out the marshmallows. Use a knife coated in the icing sugar mix to cut around the edge of the pan and spatular should get the rest out.

make sure you have your bowl of icing sugar and corn flour mix to hand and as you cut pieces of marshmallow toss these in the sugary mix one at a time to make sure they are coated and don't stick together

I even tried using a cookie cutter to press out some shapes which were fun but left lots of bits and bobs of marshmallow so they had to be eaten up and home made marshmallows are so nice Sophie had some in her frozen yoghurt and i might even try some in a hot chocolate.

Crepes

As said in american-style-pancakes post its pancake day so i am having to cater for everyone's favourite pancakes and Daddy and i love the Crepe type, thinner the better daddy said and there is an art to getting them thin which i don't always get right.

Recipe

110g plane flour

2 eggs

200ml of milk

75ml water

2 tblsp melted butter

pinch of salt

As you can see this batter is a lot thinner than the american style. All the ingredients placed in a bowl and whisked i also use butter to oil the pan to.  We both love the good old fashion lemon and sugar apart from Ali who sticks great wedges of butter inside the pancake too.  However i am partial to maple syrup and strawberries.   Remember pancakes are not just for pancake day, they are for the whole year so don't wait, enjoy.

American style pancakes

Pancake day is here and Sophie and daddy love pancakes, however they like different types American style is Sophie's favourite, these are the big puffy ones. Below i have shared an apple version and a sweetcorn version.


Recipe
135g plain flour
135ml milk
1 tsp baking powder
1 egg
1/2 tsp of salt

As you can see the batter is quite thick and i spoon this into the pan in splodges to cook.  You can of course have this the traditional way with maple syrup but we like to be a little more adventurous and i made two types of pancakes. The first i added a very generous pinch of paprika and lots of sweetcorn.

These make great lunch time snacks and they can be saved in the fridge for a day or the freezer until you fancy a snack if you don't eat them all when you make them fresh.  The sweetcorn bursts like little jewels as you eat them.

A nice breakfast or afternoon snack pancake are these scrummy apple pancakes, simply add 2 x grated apples skin as well to your batter mix with a good pinch of cinnamon and some freshly grated nutmeg.  Then once cooked dust in lots of icing sugar.

Little kickers

Sophie is now enjoying being a Little kicker at her local toddler football club and here she is sporting her footie kit which she got on her second week.

Valentine Victoria hearts

My husband had a request for a Victoria sponge cake so for Valentines i thought i would make this a little more special for him with these mini Victoria sponge Valentine hearts. My hubby is a cake hater so i was bowled over when he said he wanted a Victoria sponge cake.  I got my trusty sue chef Sophie spooning out all the ingredients before she put these into the bowl.



We made the cake in a flat square tin and when it was cooled used my heart shape cookie cutter to cut into the sponge to create hearts.  These were then cut in half and jam and butter cream put inside to make the Victoria sponge filling .  a swirl of butter cream was put on top and one of my fondant roses placed on top to make them extra special.

How to make Fondant roses

Fondant roses are pretty easy to get the knack of, you just need to give it a try and they look great on birthday or occasion cakes.

First of all you need to mix the colour into the fondant i use Wilton jells as liquid colour would make the icing to wet, the jells also have a more intense colour as well.

Make sure you wrap your icing up while your not using it as this dries out pretty fast and will go a touch crunchy which isn't good 

You also need a file pocket to just cut the bottom and side off so you have a single piece of folding plastic to put the icing inside.

roll out a shape and cut the tapered end off so when you cut you get four even sizes of icing

Roll three into balls and one into a long shape that is twice the length of the ball put these on the pocket and close the top part of the pocket over the icing

Using your thumb first and then your finger smooth these shapes out one one side of the shape is to be thin one side and fatter the other side like a wedge shape.   

roll up the long shape to make the centre of the rose

Start at the seem of the long shaped centre piece and place your first petal the second petal starts half way inside the first petal and the third petal half way inside the second roll the petals to close as you go round.

i then gave the whole flower a very gentle roll on the table to fix everything 

Next you can star to pull the petals out 

You can also shape the petals by rolling the very edges over or pinching slightly on parts to create indents as a normal petal would have 

The flower will need to be cut across the bottom to get rid of the excess icing as this could be to chunky 

Leave the flowers out to dry i tend to leave them over night

Pop Hearts

I sent Ali out at Christmas to buy me some short pastry and bless he came back with 6 boxes and sweet short pasty so now my freezer is clogged up with all this pastry and i have been wondering what to do with it, i was going to make some jam tarts with Sophie but as i have so much i can put a top and bottom on them and seeing as valentines is coming why not make them heart shaped.

Bath Food Soap

My hubby has always loved a bubble bath and he loves his smellies even more, however he suffers from a bit of eczema when he uses soap and it didn't matter what brand i bought his eczema always flared up so i had a look at the ingredients one day to see what it was that was aggravating him.

Granny Marie's 80th Birthday

This weekend saw Great granny Marie turn 80 as well as granny turn 65. In honour of great granny Marie's birthday all the family came together to wish her a happy birthday in Norwich at the Loch fyne restaurant.

Snowy Sunday

Today we woke up to a blanket of snow and Sophie was very excited about this and grabbed her sledge dragged it around the house as well as sitting in it in the living room waiting on her slow parents to get themselves together.

We decided that first of all a snowman should be build and daddy showed off his creative talents in snow sculpting and the two got busy scooping up all the snow in the garden to building Sophie a nice big snowman which she named Snowy.

Halfway through the build we had a snowball fight which Sophie enjoyed throwing snowballs at mummy and daddy but a few came a bit close to her which frightened her.  Then daddy we off to search the pots and containers for large lumps of ice and tipped out the water butt which was frozen and the bottom was filled with icy leaves.  Back to work on on our snowman as he needed a head.

We found stones or his eyes, nose and mouth as mummy didn't have a carrot for the nose, we also used the needles from our Christmas tree to make hair and gave the snowman a scarf to keep the chill out.  Daddy was very proud of his efforts and Sophie was very happy too.