Almost 1/2 a dozen rose cupcakes!

At Christmas I made some turkish delight for great nanny as a present, which involved the use of rose water, something that has since been sat in the cupboard abandoned since.  So after a brief scout on the internet I found that you can use it to make rose water cupcakes!! So I thought Alyssa and I could make 1/2 a dozen rose cupcakes and give one to granny and one to nanny as little mother's day gifts, and obviously a couple for Alyssa's mummy and the rest of the family!!

So Alyssa put on her favourite new apron, and we set to work.  After cheating a little bit and practically melting the butter in the microwave,  I let Alyssa cream together the butter and sugar pretty much all by herself before we added the rest of the ingredients.  A word of warning rose water smells beautiful, but tastes absolutely awful, I am so glad I tried it before letting Alyssa try it!! It has a very strong chemical, ethanol kind of taste when it's on it's own, but tastes wonderfully floral in cakes, turkish delight etc. 

I did change the recipe slightly using a little bit of milk instead of cream cheese when making the butter cream, but the result came out good anyway and that is all that matters.  Once everything was ready we practiced some counting putting the cupcake cases in the bun tin, before letting Alyssa spoon the mixture in.  The only problem was that the recipe was halved to make 12, but a few cheeky tastes here and there, meant we had 11 and a bit!

Once they were all baked and cooled we decorated a couple and added some pretty sprinkles, they were very yummy, but in future I would be tempted to use chocolate butter cream or maybe put chocolate chips inside for a more turkish delight taste, the children were not overly keen, and daddy thought it was too floral, so I think some chocolate would balance it out, but definitely a nice idea for mother's day, or even valentine's day instead of the usual idea of 1/2 a dozen roses!!

mixing!

counting!

bowl licking

Yum!

Wookie Cookies!!

As some of you may or may not know from reading these posts, we are a Star Wars family!! I am a late comer, after being introduced to Star Wars really more when I met my husband, the children however  have no choice in wearing Star Wars t-shirts and playing with Star Wars toys!  So on May 4th (Star Wars day!) I thought it would be fitting to make some Wookie Cookies.

Normal people on a Sunday tend to have a lie in, unfortunately in this particular house lie ins don't really exist, so by 615am I was bleary eyed making some coffee to start my day, and warming up the morning milk for the Aj's.  With three hours to go until I had to leave for work and already hyper children, how this is possible I will never know, I decided that it would be best to amuse them making the cookies before I went to work, with the bonus that I could also take one to work with me. 

The recipe makes quite a few, and we are attempting to not eat so many biscuits etc at the moment, so I decided to half the mixture, which I thought would be great to talk through with Arthur,  half of two eggs is one egg etc etc.  However whenever I do this something always goes wrong and I always forget to halve at least one item, this time it was the eggs, although I didn't realise this until I ate one and it tasted mainly of Egg!! I must remember to write out a separate recipe if I decide to do this again.

 The children enjoyed taking in turns mixing the ingredients, which is always nice to see, and drawing in the flour they had knocked all over the side.  Then whilst the cookies were in the oven, Arthur helped me make the mixture for pancakes for breakfast as he'd asked for them specially, I could always continue the theme and say they were Death Star pancakes, unfortunately though I am never very good at getting small round pancakes.  Daddy did well whilst I was at work though and make 'Pizza the hut' toast pizzas for lunch, he was very dissapointed that Arthur didn't want to watch any Star Wars though!
 

Drawing in flour

Sharing the job of mixing

Alyssa has a solo go

Cake mixture for breakfast??? Why not!!

Wookie Cookies!!

Pizza the Hutt

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St George's Day 2014

Today is St George's Day in England, legend has it that he was a Knight who bravely killed a dragon to save a princess.  In order to celebrate this, after showing the Aj's various you tube videos portraying the story, we rein-acted the story with their toys.  We also played in the cardboard castle from my previous post Knights and Castles, for a bit of dress up fun. 

We also had visitors coming in the afternoon, so I thought it would be nice if we baked some cakes to offer them, and keeping with the knightly theme I decided to use Arthur's castle baking mould that he has had for a long time, but we haven't used yet. 

Arthur helped me weigh out all the ingredients, he's become very familiar with what is needed to bake cakes, and was counting the eggs and telling me we needed flour and sugar!  I then let Arthur and Alyssa have a go at bashing some chocolate buttons (liberated from an Easter egg!) in order to make chocolate chip buns.  I then made the very silly mistake of letting the two of them loose with the hand mixer! They were being well behaved and Arthur let Alyssa hold it as well, however the angle they held it meant that cake mixture sprayed all over the counter, up the wall, over the cookbook, the kettle... everything!

They then took it in turns to spoon the mixture into the mould, and enjoyed the best part f the baking process, licking the spoon and bowl, it was really hard to tear it away from them they we enjoying it so much.  Unfortunately the cakes didn't come out like they should have, I think I may have tried removing them too early, but they tasted lovely all the same.

Breaking the chocolate

Spraying, I mean mixing!!

Dolloping!

More dolloping!

Tasting!

TaDah! Oh!! Not quite right!

How they were meant to look!

St George saving the Princess!

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Hot cross buns!!

I've been looking forward to doing this with the Aj's as I have never made Hot cross buns before, and I was interested in learning how to create the crosses and what they are made of.  On the morning Alyssa had had a terrible nights sleep, so was still in bed when we started, I decided the best thing to do was to make the dough first thing, then distract them with breakfast and getting dresed for the day whilst they were set aside to rise!

We started of by measuring out the flour and adding the butter, then I got Arthur to 'tickle' the flour to rub the flour and butter together, I also helped with this as well as it's quite hard for him to do. Then we added the other dry products, once he had had a chance to sell the spices.  Then he confidently mixed the wet ingredients into the flour and stirred it all together.  Having an electric scale I thought it would be a good idea to show him the numbers when weighing and get him to look for a five when weighing 50g etc to introduce some number recocnigtion, which he seemed to enjoy!

Once the dough was ready we had to roll the mixture into 8 balls, however Arthur wasn't very good at this as he was too interested in playing and stretching the dough rather than rolling it, but he was having fun so I just rolled all the others till all that was left was his one.

As i've said it was time for breakfast and getting dressed (and mummy to clean up) whilst the dough was rising then I mixed together the paste for the crosses, and helped Arthur squeeze the shapes out using a sandwich bag as a piping bag.  Then it was all down to Arthur to brush with the golden syrup, which I had warmed in the microwave for easier use.  During all this Alyssa was still asleep, in fact she was still asleep when they came out the oven so she missed the whole event.  She did however get to eat one of the buns for breakfast, so I think she planned it that way all along!  They were very very big however compared to the usual shop bought ones, so in future I may make double the amount, or just be greedy and have large ones!!

Adding the spices

"tickling the flour!"

Getting stuck in!

Mixing it all up and getting messy!

Adding the crosses!

We did take a picture of the finished buns, but it seems to have disapeared from the files, but theyy did look and taste great! I promise!


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