Face painting

Sophie has been well and truly  hooked into face painting after our visit to a skilled lady at an event we went to recently.  The lady had an art degree and it totally shows by the lovely butterfly she painted on Sophie face.

Cubby kit hand print flowers

So we are still working through our Cubby kit box and the second activity we choose was making hand print flowers.

Lakeland cake pop maker

How much fun can you have with cake? A lot ! Cake pops are the latest craze and must have at any good party, events, special occasions or just because they are so darn cute.  

Cubby Kit Cress heads

Happy days we have our next Cubby Kit, the fantastic box of goodies to inspire little minds and stimulate creativity.

Frankie and Benny's not such a good review

This will be the first time i have written a not so glowing report and as i write this i do so  from my bed.

Clandestine cake club

Oh today couldn't have got any better and it was a day i have been looking forward to for a long time the first meeting of the Clandestine cake club in Aylesbury and Bucks.

Battenberg cake

This was defiantly a taxing task, and i ended up making 5 cakes just to find a good recipe and there are so many recipes that i found that failed.

First i made a recipe from the BBC website and it used ground almonds in the cake this was the biggest fail the cake never cooked even though i cooked it for twice as long as the recommend time and it was still uncooked and ground almonds just made the cake thick, heavy and stodgy, i wonder do these people test there recipes?. Next i surfed you tube and someone had a recipe i tried it cooked fine but the taste test was just cake in marzipan and had no taste of Battenberg or texture.  Finally i turned  Mary berry and tried her recipe and it was ok light and fluffy but it used ground rice in it and was a bit crunchy in areas.

Next was colour issues with the pink part, i was using Dr Oetkar, in the first batch i used twice the amount of the colour Mary recommended and as you can see above the mix is defiantly PINK but when it is cooked the pink disappeared as you can see in the below

So another cook of the pink section with 8 times the colour see below

 and HEY PRESTO Pink disappear

OK time to ditch the Dr and go back to my reliable Wiltons and a pink of this gave the results required first time and as you can see from the very top picture Wiltons didnt not let me down.

I also found that making a Battenberg you have to be incredibly accurate and the first bake i made in a normal square tin i ended up trimming and trimming to get it perfect loosing lots of cake and never getting quite right.  Then i found this special Battenberg tin on Amazon with separators and now i have perfect cubes of cake every time i use it.

Finally i have the perfect recipe, tin and marzipan to make a Battenberg cake and of course my little helper 

Ingredients

pre heat the oven at 160c

200g soften butter

200g caster sugar

4 eggs

100g ground rice

200g self raising flour

1 tsp baking powder

almond extract

WILTONS pink food colouring

First measure out all your ingredients and place in a bowl this is a great recipe as you just put everything in the bowl and don't have to cream the butter and sugar together.

Whisk the eggs and add these too, and then whisk everything together for 1 min then scrap down the sides and whisk for another good min everything should be well mixed and fluffy. I then get two bowls and measure out the cake mix to give and even qty in each, I add the pink food colouring to the second bowl and stir in well. then i divide all of this between the four compartments of the tin and cook at 160 for 30 mins     

Once the cake has cooled down just chop the top off across the top of the tin and turn out and you should have 4 perfect cubes of cake to put together. (The below has a shot of one of my non pink failings )

Assembling is very easy but i completely forgot to take pictures. Place a yellow and pink bit as a base and brush generous amounts of apricot jam on the sides that touch and push together then brush the top of the pink and yellow and then add another layer of pink and yellow cake but the opposite way round to the base. Make sure you cover all the inside of pink and yellow cake and push together so the apricot jam is like a cross inside the now larger cube of cake. 

Roll out the marzipan recipe found here brush where you want the base of the cake to sit and then place your Battenberg on top brush one side and the top of your cake with more jam and gently fold up and press the marzipan to the cake, then do the same to the other side and trim.  Use a wet knife to bring together the join of the marzipan leave to dry and dust a little icing sugar over the seam so it isnt sticky and turn this part upside down so it becomes the base of your cake.  Then trim any marzipan and trim each side of your cake to show off its colours.

Home made Marzipan

I have never made home made marzipan before, but as i was making a Battenburg cake i wanted to make the marzipan by hand to, well i say i and your start to think if you have read my cooking pages that i do nothing in the kitchen now and your be right.  After tasting the marzipan i thought it was so much nicer than shop bought and i will make this for the Christmas cake now especially as there is only 3 steps to make marzipan.


Ingredients
200g Ground almonds
100g Icing sugar
100g Caster sugar
1 egg
1 egg yolk
1 tbsp lemon juice
Almond extract

Put all the dry ingredients together and mix

Add lemon juice, almond extract to eggs and lightly whisk

Add the wet and dry mix with a spoon until pulled together then need till smooth, so easy a 2 year old could do this.

When i dream of 1 2 3

Are you sitting comfortably then i shall begin. This is a story all about counting, do you see the cover it is all sparkly with glitter and feels all bumpy.  The pictures look great and i think this book will be a visual feast.  Shall we turn the page??

White Chocolate and basil mousse

If you wondered what to have with your brandy snap I blogged about yesterday, how about this light and fluffy white chocolate and basil mousse.  This is a great make ahead desert.

Brandy Snaps

I had a go at making Brandy snaps a posh little crunchy treat you can place on the side of a dessert.  These were very tasty and i will make these again especially as they only took 15 mins to make.

Lemon and Elderflower sorbet

This is a lovely snowball in a glass, fresh and light and a perfect dessert or treat for a nice sunny day and can also be eaten as an amuse bouche.  Not only is this unbelievable easy to make your have to stop yourself going back for seconds

Ingredients 
150g caster sugar
1 pint water
juice of 3 lemons
4 tbsp of elderflower cordial
1 egg white

place the sugar in a pan with 1pint of water to dissolve over a low heat and once dissolved simmer for 5 mins until your have made a light syrup. if you have a sugar thermometer it should have a temperature of 106c.

Allow the syrup to cool completely and stir in the lemon juice and cordial and freeze.

When frozen remove from the freeze and break up into chucks and add to a food processor with the egg white and process till smooth and then return to the freezer until frozen

If your making this at the right time of year and fancy making your own Elderflower cordial check out my post on how to make this  elderflower and lemon cordial this lasts all year long so its a great make for your store cupboard.

Push pan 20cm

I have a favourite new cake tin. This 20cm Push pan was sent to me from Lakeland to test out and im so greatful i think its brilliant.

Easter wreath

Today we pretended to be florists, and made an Easter wreath to welcome granny and grumps to our house.

Homemade Easter eggs

Now im going to sound like a tight wad but honestly im not as i have bought Easter eggs but i noticed that for 300g of egg you can pay anything from £8 to £15 for the egg and 70g of egg is a £1.

Now the reason for making the Easter eggs was more for the fun and creativity with Sophie rather than the cost. Seeing as you can buy better quality chocolate than you get in a Easter egg being £1 for 100g we bought Menier Patissier.  I thought this was an interesting fact that your paying more for the packaging as eggs are rather fragile things and which you throw away instead of paying for the quantity of chocolate you get.

Even silicon moulds are cheap this one cost a £1 and the chocolate £2 and gave us an hour together playing in the kitchen, being creative and having fun just what you need for a half term activity.

We even used rainbow sprinkles which we put into the moulds first and added the white chocolate on top to the sprinkles really showed through.  We then added the milk chocolate after the white chocolate after this had a chance to set for 5-10 min.  We put these into the fridge to set and releasing them from the silicon moulds was simple as they just popped out.  We even had enough chocolate to make jazzy buttons, which we squirted a spot on grease proof paper and topped with rainbow sprinkles while the chocolate was still wet.  Daddy loves jazzy buttons and i think we will have to make more of these.

Chocolate bunny lollies

We pretended to be chocolateteers today in the kitchen and oh what fun we had, 2 girls and lots of lovely chocolate.

Painting Easter eggs kit

What a fantastic morning we had today getting all crafty painting some pretty eggs all curtsey of the wonderful people from Lakeland who sent Sophie an Egg Decoration Kit.

Felting egg

I don't know what possessed me but i have had a polystyrene egg in my craft cupboard for a while and i haven't done any felting so i thought i would see if i could use my felting tools to felt upon the egg.

i was worried at first that i might break my needles but it really seemed to work out fine and after a bit of time beavering away i had managed to felt onto the egg this Easter design.  Who would have thought you could do this so now i will be looking at my craft store for more polystyrene shape and see what i could do with them.