Easter Boxes

My kids eat too much chocolate at Easter and it never makes me particularly happy, after all I spend all year trying to make sure they don’t eat their body weight in the stuff and then twice a year (Christmas is also bad), I’m meant to give them free reign? Anyway, I know I can’t win on that one but this year I thought I’d tone down the amount of chocolate they were getting from us (grandparents are a law onto themselves). This decision came at a point anyway where I had to switch what sort of Easter eggs I was getting them, they’re too old for the little kiddy ones and I’m certainly not getting them full size ‘adult’ eggs, you know the sort of branded ones for Dairy Milk, Maltesers or whatever, as I definitely don’t like them eating what I term ‘grown up’ chocolate, as the portion sizes are too big (actually Maltesers aren’t that bad*, if they’re shared ….). So, anyway this year I got their chocolate from Marks and Spencer, it’s less obviously branded, has some nicely designed packaging and comes in a range of sizes, so I could buy smaller eggs. So I bought a small hen egg each, a tube of Jelly beans (after I succumbed to temptation in the queue in Smiths, WH Smith are getting increasingly annoying with their peddling of sweets and god knows what at the check out) and taking inspiration from Angry Chicken, I bought a few bags of various small chocolate eggs plus two little mini bunnies from M&S and made some ‘candy terrariums’.

Really I could have done with some bigger containers than the Kilner jars I used, as you can’t really see the rabbits in the middle but I liked how they kept the chocolate safe from the elements and I thought the kids would like a jar each of their own, as sometimes we have a family jar of sweets up on the shelf. I also thought it would encourage them to make the chocolate last longer. (I’m grabbing the jars back off them when they’ve finished with them).

To distinguish between jars I made a couple of embroidered tags, a vintage pattern for Boy Lacer and a free pattern from Lilipopo for Girl Lacer. They were embroidered on felt, I’m really pleased with how Boy Lacer’s turned out.

But no so much with Girl Lacer’s, I should have used white felt again but ran out.

The light’s also bad in these photos, I predict light is only going to be good some time in mid April (I hope).

Also in the boxes are a small present each; Girl Lacer was easy, a bubble writing book, she is obsessed with that at the moment, so should love it. Boy Lacer was harder, he’s always hard, as to be honest he’s not really happy with anything unless it’s electrical, but as he sometimes likes building thing in real life as well as on screen, I took a chance on some art straws, ah well if anything Girl Lacer will get her hands on them in 6 months time.

And finally I made them a softie each, well aware as I was working on them that a) I hadn’t made softies in a long time (the number of rookie mistakes I made with these!) and b) my kids really are getting too old, but it’s the thought that counts and I’m going to make the most of every last available opportunity to do things like that for them whilst there’s still a chance they might appreciate it. Unfortunately of my generation, in my immediate family, there aren’t many kids and certainly no babies anymore (actually there is one but I don’t really see the parents that much, if at all), so my small children crafting opportunities are non existant, will have to twiddle my thumbs for twenty odd years till I’m a grandma Anyway, the rabbit bodies were from an Aranzi Aranzo book but I changed the eyes and added the tummy detail.

(sneak peak of my new garden)

The rabbits were heavily inspired by my absolute Twitter favourite @MYSADCAT  , a cat with the most soulful, staring eyes.

*I read once, an interview with some master chocolatier and he said that of all the main stream branded chocolate, in his opinion Maltesers were the nicest, most ‘proper’ chocolate sweet, I could always see what he meant.

Hot cross buns

Easter is like Christmas, craft wise, but with far less pressure, so I wanted to cook something Easter-y and considering I’ve been eating my body weight in Waitrose hot cross buns (imho the nicest supermarket hot cross bun ever, particularly the wholemeal or the apple and cinnamon varieties and unfortunately for my waistline always on special offer if you buy two packs), I thought I’d give the real thing a go. I had planned to cook a Rachel Allen recipe, well, I certainly wasn’t going to try the hot cross bun recipe I tried last year, which was a disaster. But then I caught up with The Great British Bake Off Easter Special on iPlayer and old blue eyes himself was making hot cross buns and well of course I jumped ship. The recipe from the show is here but I used the recipe from Paul Hollywood’s How to Bake, which is pretty much exactly similar, except in the book he uses a mix of milk and water for the liquid component and on GBO he used just milk.

So, this morning I kneaded the dough.

Making the most (for the first time since the kitchen was done) of the real wood worktops, I would never have done that on our old disgusting, hard to get properly clean laminate and it is one of the reasons why, when I was busy finding the cheapest possible tiles and quibbling over the costs of towel radiators, I completely splashed out on the worktops (although in my defence, at least one benefit of a tiny kitchen, I wasn’t ordering an awful lot of real wood worktop).

I then left it to rise whilst I went shopping (Girl Lacer being a complete sweetheart and wanting to buy Grandma and Granddad Easter Eggs with her own money, whilst Boy Lacer wanted to buy an Easter Egg for himself …). Then back to knock the dough down and add the mixed fruit, apple and cinnamon, kneaded again (helped by Girl Lacer this time) and then left to rise for a second time. I then shaped  them into buns (struggling to get 12 buns, settling instead for 10) and left to rise for a final time.

I then added the crosses (watching Paul Hollywood do this on TV the night before really helped) and in the oven they went!

They then tortured us for 20 minutes with the most divine smell ever (although to be honest it was smelling pretty good when being kneaded earlier to) and came out looking like this (after I put apricot glaze on)!

And they tasted gorgeous (the kids have been road testing them against some Waitrose ones we still had in the cupboard and they say mine are nicer, they’re definitely more airy and less doughy / squishy and the addition of apple is genisus, they’re very filling though).

Possibly the world’s ugliest hot cross buns?

I’ve been wanting to make hot cross buns for a while, I’m fussy about my hot cross buns and I can inform you that in my opinion the ones in the Co-op are yuck (although the kids like them, for some reason the kids like anything from the Co-op as they associate it with junk food), the ones from Sainsburys aren’t that much better and the ones from Waitrose used to be gorgeous but then they changed the recipe, see why I’ve been wanting to make my own?

So I consulted Peyton and Byrne and set about the extremely lengthy process, as the dough required multiple risings and multiple foldings over to make it ‘a bit like puff pastry’ (I’m paraphrasing there). Maybe the alarm bells should have started ringing at the ‘a bit like puff pastry’ bit, as I don’t know about you but I don’t particularly associate hot cross buns with puff pastry. It also added quite a bit of time to the the extremely lengthy process, in making it ‘a bit like puff pastry’.

Still, it was fun though, as I’ve said before about the Peyton and Byrne book, making stuff from it feels like I am actually making something in a way that bunging some ingredients in a bowl and stirring doesn’t. So, although it took a large part of the afternoon, I didn’t particularly begrudge it at the time.

But they came out, ummm ‘lumpy’, the crosses were hard to do and they looked burnt (although in fairness to me, they looked pretty ‘brown’ in the book to) and even though they looked burnt, I’m not totally convinced the middle of some of these is cooked properly.

The buns were made with the Peyton and Byrne sweet bun dough recipe, which also goes to make honey buns and chelsea buns and although I don’t know about the honey buns, the way how the hot cross buns came out, how when you opened them up you could see the ‘a bit like puff pastry’ folds, it was far more like a chelsea bun than a hot cross one, tasted quite like a chelsea bun to. So I will probably not make the hot cross bun recipe from Peyton and Byrne again and probably not the honey buns either, as I can’t imagine them being much better than the hot cross buns but I think I will be giving the chelsea buns a try but if I do I am going to be very careful about the timings.

Simnel cake

I guess maybe it’s the fact that I didn’t make a Christmas cake from scratch last year but I was hit by the urge to do some seasonal cooking this Easter. The above (yes burnt) cake is a Simnel Cake, largely based on a recipe from the Peyton and Byrne book (I changed it around a little, swapping glace cherries for grated stem ginger and marmalade under the marzipan for lime preserve – because that’s what I had). The resulting cake still tasted quite Peyton and Byrne like (i.e. yummy), I and the mother-in-law liked it, Girl Lacer liked the cake but not the marzipan, Boy Lacer liked the marzipan but not the cake (so they can share the next slice then) and Mr. Lacer just doesn’t like fruit cake anyway.

My only criticism of the recipe is that there is clearly a typo in the Peyton and Byrne book, as the recipe stated that the cake would be cooked in 50-60 minutes, it was barely set in 50-60 minutes, let alone cooked properly. In the end it stayed in for around 2 hours, I did a quick check online and most Simnel recipes stated that sort of time, so I think that was the issue.

Oh (and in case you think I’m an idiot), no I didn’t decorate the cake and then put it in the oven, I put it under the grill instead (once decorated) because that’s what the book said to, I think the word was, ‘burnish’ the marzipan. Actually, although it looks burnt, it  doesn’t really taste burnt and it does leave a nice crisp upper layer to the marzipan . . .

PS I know it’s meant to be 11 balls of marzipan.

Girl Lacer’s Easter embroidery

Her own design and her first attempt at satin stitching (the bands on the eggs) (and her back stitching has really improved to). The only help from me was to keep threading her needle for her.

Happy Easter!

So it’s Easter again, feels like yesterday it was Christmas, so I’m not particularly in a ‘holiday’ mood, also Easter = chocolate (sorry, but we’re not at all religious as a family) and I have no will power in that department and I’m meant to be on a diet. Luckily I haven’t actually had much chocolate (and neither have the kids, which is lucky for me as I tend to ‘hover’ up the remains of their collection) but I’ve still managed to eat one whole Easter egg box set and three-quarters of another egg today and feel quite blargh and also very inclined to agree with the chapter in this book that says we have no free will because honestly I didn’t even want to finish off that first egg this morning, I still did though.

The kids got from the Easter bunny a garden toy each (as both being born in the Autumn we use Easter as an excuse to buy garden toys, otherwise they’d never have any) and a small egg, they also got a soft toy bunny to, which I blogged about here, where Girl Lacer gets the gorgeous knitted bunny she saw online and desperately wanted and Boy Lacer gets the softie I made that I wasn’t that happy with but I wasn’t too bothered because I thought (unlike Girl Lacer who would play with her bunny), Boy Lacer would pretty much ignore it. Huh, I couldn’t be more wrong, the two bunnies sit there in the pile of presents (Boy Lacer’s first response when he sees his pile by the way, was “I’m still 4 aren’t I?”, Boy Lacer is probably pretty much the only 4 year old boy in the country who absolutely does not want to be 5, as he equates 5 with going to big school and he wants to “go to X nursery forever and ever, all the time”), anyway so the two bunnies are sitting there, Boy Lacer picks up his bunny and examines it closely, looking at the different materials, noticing that the bunny’s skirt is made out of the same material as the shirt I made him the other day, which he approves of strongly and is later on in the day still seen wondering about with it, Girl Lacer on the other, the girl who begged me for the rabbit she wanted, did not even pick it up from the sofa, at all and goes “I wanted that didn’t I?”, duh, Girl, I am going to be less able to convince next time.

So, we had quite a chilled morning and then in the afternoon my dad came to visit and we went to the park for a very long and muddy (to an appropriately fun level) and I got to play with my phone again.

Puddles

It has been a very long, long weekend, the weather has been absolutely miserable and I’m not the sort of person who is good at staying in with nothing to do and I am beginning to dislike chocolate (despite actually eating it as I type). The long range weather forecast had always suggested that today, Easter Monday would be better, so we planned to go to Wisley but it didn’t start out very good with it snowing / sleeting first thing (i.e. not the fun sort of snow which settles), so there was much family debate about whether we should go, divided along the lines of Mr. Lacer not wanting to go anywhere if it were cold and miserable versus the rest of the family who were desperate to go out having been cooped up for 4 days. An argument demonstrating the difference between mine and Mr. Lacer’s upbringing, as during the discussion both my dad and then his mum happened to ring up, my dad is the hardy type (hence living in North Wales) and will go out in pretty much any weather and is a great believer in going out (and he was consequently dragging me and my sister everywhere when we were kids), so he thought we should go out regardless of whatever the weather was doing. Then the mother-in-law rang and she sat firmly on the side of it’s pointless going out if it’s cold.

Anyway eventually I coaxed Girl Lacer into a non-driving going out alternative which meant Mr. Lacer could rest his soft Midlands bones in the warmth (is it a regional thing? I spent my childhood from about 5 – 18, all bar 18 months which my dad hated living a not too far distance from the sea in South Wales and Norfolk, so maybe having the opportunity for plenty of bracing all year seaside walks toughened me up). So I took the kids out, oh excitements of excitements to the supermarket to buy some bread and goats milk, wow.

It stopped snowing pretty soon after we set off and by the time we got to the river on the way to the supermarket there were plenty of puddles for the kids to splash in and splashing in puddles is definitely a pre-schooler national sport, my two love it, Boy Lacer will pretend to splash in puddles even when there aren’t any, shame he doesn’t have any similar feelings of appreciation towards the bath.

As you can see from the photo Boy Lacer was already starting to get muddy, but shortly afterwards he landed (perfectly happily I should add) face down in a Boy Lacer shaped puddle, a particularly muddy puddle and shortly after that Girl Lacer took a joyous leap into another puddle and landed bottom down right in it’s middle. So short of having to purchase some new clothes for both of them I had to rouse Mr. Lacer from his warm cocoon and drag him out into the cold with a change of clothes. So we met in a nearby department store, me with two happy albeit very muddy children in tow, Mr. Lacer then disappeared to drive back home and I still had to go and buy a jacket for Boy Lacer as Mr. Lacer had only brought a jumper, but Boy Lacer needed a new mac anyway (he really is developing a rugby player physique (well we’re in the right part of London), he’s now 3 – 4 year old tops but still 18 – 24 month trousers (he’s almost 2 1/2)). After that me and the kids managed to get to the supermarket (and they were rather hyper having not been ‘exercised’ for 4 days) and then onto McDonalds (which had been my promise for not going to Wisley).

We got home to find Mr. Lacer had been doing some tidying up, unfortunately he’d targeted the pile of stuff by the door which ok looked messy but I knew what was in it and now an important form which I needed to hand in soon has gone missing, sigh, he could have tidied the kitchen, needs doing and there’s nothing to lose in there!