Chocolate crispy cakes

Half term is nearly over yet there is still more time for a little cake making in the kitchen, and as it is Easter what better than the chocolate crispy cakes, just incase you had not had enough chocolate yet.

 So while Sophie is stirring up a storm of melting chocolate Ella is polishing her rolling pin skills on some pastry.

Ingredients 

200g of cornflakes
6 tbsp of golden syrup
100g butter
200g dark chocolate


Method 

Melt the butter, chocolate and syrup together, we have a dish over simmering water.

pout over cornflakes and make sure they are all coated before spooning out into cake cases

Soda Bread

Because the house smells great with fresh baking and its always nice to lick the spoon of your creation and share a slice of cake.

Its nice to have some home baking in the house for the week, to feed hungry mouths when they come home from school, having tea and cake with fellow mummies over a play date, or 4 o'clock snacks between lunch and dinner wouldn't be the same without a cookie or two.  

What ever the reason its good to get into the kitchen especially with little ones to give them the practical skills in measuring, mixing and taste as well as satisfaction that they have created and cooked something themselves.

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Soda Bread is one of my favorite breads to eat it has a lovely crumberly texture and great smothered in butter. i have never known how to make it and thought it maybe difficult.  I have enjoyed watching Paul Hollywood on t.v recently with his making bread series and one of the episodes was about soda bread where he said that is was one of the easiest breads to make so easy his 11 year old boy made it.  As Sophie is a rather good little cook at 3 years old we thought we would give it a go.

Friday nights home made Pizza

Part of my home made take away range blogs this week we are doing home made pizza, and i really should of done a Ta Da finish cooked pizza shot but little miss had been making the pizza with me and when the dinger went on the oven she started chanting dinner dinner, so i had to cut it up for her and put on a plate for her to eat.

We started by making our own dough but of course you could buy ready made pizza bases if you want, but the dough is pretty simple enough to do and i buy my fresh yeast off Ebay of all places since i have stopped shopping at Tesco's where i used to get it from, you can also use dried yeast too.

Pizza base recipe

40g fresh yeast 

30g sugar

1/2 pint of warm milk

250g strong bread flour

1 tbs olive oil

3/4 tsp salt

warm the milk and the sugar, i just put mine in the microwave for a min then add the yeast and stir and leave for 15 mins to active and get frothy.

Sophie then measures out the rest of the ingredients with me and we add them to the bowl one at a time together.  Once the yeast mix is ready we turn on the K mix and gradually add the milk until we get a firmish dough sometimes i need all the milk and sometimes not, so mix and add the milk until you get the dough consistence right using your eye rather than the qty above.  I leave this dough on top on my oven to keep warm and rise about an hour.  

In the mean time Sophie and i get lots of vegetables out of the fridge and look, smell and taste them, i let her have a butter knife so she can cut and play with the vegetables she is rather keen on raw mushrooms now, and loves to copy me in chopping and organising the veg.

After an  hour we get our hands into the dough and knock it back and kneed it, she get a small lump of dough to move around the work top, them she helps me roll out the main bit of dough singing her rolly rolly song.  Once rolled we leave on top of the oven again to rise a little, we like a thin base so it isn't left to rise to long.  Then the fun begins as we place all the vegetables we cut on top of the pizza, over the tomato paste, although Sophie just tends to luz them all in one area, we will work on placement later, next we finish off with the pepperoni else daddy will have words with the chefs and top it all off with grated mozzarella, and put it in the oven for 15 mins.  This is such a great way to get kids eating vegetables and Sophie ate 2 big slices which had courgette red and yellow peppers, red onion, chestnut mushrooms, olives, pepperdew peppers on it. What a good girl, mummy was so happy with her, and i think she was happy being included in the process.