Half Term Holiday

Luckily Piglet is a keen baker. We have been catching up on The Great British Bakeoff on i-player and enjoying watching the beautiful concoctions the competitors come up with. I thought of this scheme which would occupy two days of the holiday in a useful and nourishing fashion:
Day 1: bake cakes. 
Day 2: invite other little piglets round to eat them. 

Well, of course there isn't just the baking of the cakes to consider.We spent time choosing a recipe and then we went to the shops to get stuff to cook it with and some other stuff. What with the Great BB watching, breakfast and some spelling homework, that was the morning taken care of. 

Then in the afternoon we got baking. Piglet has always been one for getting her hands in and from the start would rub the butter diligently into the flour herself rather than slope off going: "I'm bored," leaving me to do the hard bits. Nowadays we have the Kitchenaid cakemixer which I bought for my 50th birthday, however she sometimes does her cake baking by hand anyway because it is fun. 

From John Lewis

Next day I rushed round collecting cat food and the three other little piglets, before rushing round some more making sandwiches and makka kappi while they all played at Sylvanian Families. I make jelly in this old Victorian jelly mould I bought once in a jumble sale and then I get cross because it won't come out of the mould properly. One day I'll find some Victorian method of getting the jelly perfectly out of the mould and make a beautiful jelly. (Probably it was designed for meat jellies, which might be firmer. Maybe if I did blancmange? The friend I consulted said, Stupid, of course it doesn't work! Jelly moulds have come on considerably since those days, just buy a modern mould.)

Having previously experimented with making our own icing, I decided we would buy some ready-to-roll stuff instead.

Another fine mess, LOL.

Mmmmmmm. 

No, you cannot lick out the mixing bowl, I'm washing it up now. 



 

About £3.50 from Asda.

Ooops, that cake at the top has fallen over, maybe it needs eating up ...? 

Le Tout Ensemble. 

Crumbs! Not much makka kappi or biscuits left by the end, LOL.

(NB Cookery is useful for encouraging maths and science, especially if you are doubling up or halving ingredients. Nowadays there is emphasis on getting children to learn how to do maths in ordinary life rather than just on the page. There are lots of everyday problem solving opportunities in cookery, e.g., if I eat half of that little cake, will it still topple off the cake stand ...?)