Tessa Kiros’ odd shaped ‘Ginger’bread biscuits

Lunch during today’s outing included, as well as the ubiquitous (I’m starting to get complaints here) marmite sandwiches, gingerbread biscuits I made last night from Tessa Kiros’ Apples for Jam. We’re a big fan of gingerbread in this family, well, three of us are, Mr. Lacer hates it, however he could happily eat these biscuits (despite whinging they were a bit soft) as he couldn’t taste the ginger, despite the fact that I’d put half a teaspoon of ginger powder in the dough. You could more taste the cardamon and cloves really, it was an odd recipe, involving single cream and maple syrup, it did taste nice (and quite Christmasy in August) but I doubt I’ll make them again, if anything because they committed the cardinal sin (for me) of being really difficult to cut into shapes, I ended up giving up and just made splodges instead.

ready for the picnic lunch

Recipe here.

Innocent Village Fete

We went to the Innocent Village Fete in Regent’s Park today, so a rare trip into the centre of the city for us. Thankfully we’ve finally found a method of getting to the Regent’s Park area we like and that is pram friendly; a train into Waterloo and then a bus, going by bus is quite nice, you get to see all the landmarks which you obviously wouldn’t see by tube.

The Fete itself was massive, which, unlike a lot of these sort of things, had really good looking food, unfortunately though as budget conscious day trippers we’d packed our own lunch (a little more about that in my next post) but it was mainly marmite sandwiches again. There were also obviously a lot of smoothies being sold (Innocent being a smoothie company). We saw welly wanging; lots of live music (which Boy Lacer loved in particular); morris dancers (which Boy Lacer loved even more, dancing and clapping along);

entered one of my bendy cucumbers into a weird vegetable competition;

watched some ferret racing;

got caught in a very bad rain storm and had to shelter at the animal petting farm;

but then the sun came out again and onto the coconut shy with it’s temptingly labelled coconuts;

I really wanted Girl Lacer to hit the Primark coconut, even though *blush* I brought some socks from there yesterday; we then spent ages in the excellent children’s area, Girl Lacer had ago at line dancing and then finally onto the book tombola where I gave away my much hated copy of Anita Brookner and didn’t win a goodie bag in return and the kids had fun with the giant fridge magnetic poetry, even though they can’t read; this was one of Boy Lacer’s attempts.

Then the long journey back home again, which is the worst bit about living in the very suburbs of London, it takes ages, two and a half hours each way today and according to my sister she can get to North Wales on the train in that time! But all in all an excellent day out.