We heart maps!

If our family likes anything, it is a good look at a map! Many an hour have been spent that way. I didn't get it when I first married into this motley crew but now i am as much of a sucker for it as the rest of them!
So, as our sister and brother in-law and their two boys are moving far, far away to the south of France to fulfill their dream, I decided to make this as a house warming pressie. I had seen something very similar in 'not on the highstreet.com' and I'm afraid it was just too easy to copy. It features nine of the place they have lived in various map types, with a special big heart for their dream home.
I hope they have a wonderful time building their ideal home, and wish them lots of luck. We will miss them a great deal, but I can't wait to go and visit and knock down a wall!

Ice cream update

I thought i would just give you an update, less than one month in, to how many different ice creams we have made with the new ice cream maker.
I haven't any decent photos as we were too excited making them to take photos, but maybe you can imagine them!

1. Madagascan vanilla (Gordon Ramsay base recipe - lots of cream)
2. Nutella (Gordon Ramsay base recipe adding nutella and omitting vanilla)
3. Oreo Cookies (Nigel Slater base - more egg, & milk not cream with crushed oreos)
4. Smarties (Nigel Slater base with crushed smarties)
5. 'Bounty' (Using cocomut milk in place of cream in the base plus toasted desiccated coconut and grated milk chocolate)
6. Mint Choc Chip (By infusing milk/cream mix with finely chopped fresh mint, straining and adding grated milk chocolate)
7. Banana Sherbert (like a sorbet but with milk in too, infusing the bananas in the milk)
8. Tropical fruit sorbet (mangoes, pineapple and passion fruit plus stock syrup)
9. Raspberry ripple ( Nigel Slater vanilla base with fresh raspberry coulis rippled through)

So far my favourites are the Nutella and the Bounty. When I get more time I will post the exact recipes and methods.

A bad rainbow day

Today everything I have touched has gone wrong in one way or another! I left my wallet on top of my car after doing the shopping! The boys jacket potatoes exploded! We went outside to do a painting and then it started to rain and you will see what happened to their pudding! I think I would like to go to bed and start again tomorrow!
Anyway, the plan for today was to do a few rainbow related activities, sing the song, find things around the house in each of the colours etc.
We also decorated a piece of mdf we had knocking about to make some form of stair barrier for Charlie. Not sure if it will work but our stairs are an annoying width and type and as we are only tenants we won't be able to put up anything complicated.

Then we tried to make a rainbow sponge in a jam jar but this is what happened when we cooked it in the microwave for 2 mins! I was hoping it would stay in the layers but obviously the microwaves cook in a different way as they all came up from the bottom, and I must have been over generous with the mix as there was far too much to stay in the jam jar.

 I will persevere with this and try and get it right another time but for now they still looked great in a bowl with some smarties and hundreds and thousands! Very psychedelic... though not very natural!

Colour Spot Bunting

Today we rearranged the family room and now I can't help but wonder why we didn't think of that layout months ago, it is so much better!
While we were sorting it all out I decided we needed some more colour. It is already quite colourful with all the kids toys and the art work and things but it needed something to make it look more deliberate rather than just a muddle of everything flung together.
So we got out the paint sample cards that I picked up thinking we would make use of them one day, cut out some circles and threaded them together to make colour spot bunting. It's my new obsession!

Dinosaur tails

Yesterday was a rainy Saturday when we had nothing to do, so I made the boys some dinosaur tails out of dark green felt, the hollow fibre stuffing from a cushion and a little bit of velcro! They made the masks out of card, pens and some of my hairbands.

Sorry about the blurry photo, the camera has stopped working properly.

Twinkly Star, Space Dust Playdough

Today's craft activity was making and playing with some twinkly star, space dust playdough.

Recipe

• 1 cup flour
• 1/2 cup salt
• 2 tbsp cream of tartar
• 1 cup water
• 1/2 small bottle back food colouring
• 2 tbsp oil
• 1/2 phial of glitter 

Mix the dry ingredients in a bowl. Mix the food colouring into the cup of water then stir into the dry ingredients. Meanwhile heat the oil in a saucepan over a medium high heat. When hot add the gloopy mix and stir over the heat until it goes non-stick and playdough like.

Then put on a heat proof mat to cool down. When cool, knead it whilst adding enough glitter to make it look like a galaxy. Store in a sealable container. Should keep for a month or more. 

I only had gold glitter, I imagine silver will look better, and maybe some purple would be good too. Next time.

Eastern Mediterranean Sunday lunch

It's not a particularly good looking Sunday lunch, but it was super yummy.

We made lamb kofte kebabs, flavoured with cinnamon, cumin, & mint. We made Baba Ganoush (smoky aubergine dip), Tzatziki, Grilled Halloumi, some dry-fried tortilla strips and a Mediterranean vegetable & potato salad (courgettes, bell peppers, new potatoes, carrots, onions roasted in the oven with thyme then with some chopped preserved lemons mixed in)

Saturday Family Breakfast - Mouse Pancakes

I think I am getting a little unhealthily obsessed with making food into the shape of animals but hey-ho! Maybe I'll grow out of it soon. 

But in the meantime, Saturday's Family Breakfast featured Mouse Pancakes!

I intended on them being teddy bears but they looked a lot more like mice in the end.They werem ade with standard American Pancake mix just make 4 pancakes at the same time per person. One bigger, two medium and then one a bit smaller than those but oval shape for the nose. I microwaved a spoonful of nutella for a few seconds so make it pour-able, then spooned that on for the nose, inside of the ears and eyes. I added 2 raisins to the eyes and some jam for a mouth.

Cake Pops for Charlie Bear's Christening

You might consider this a bit of a spoiler so if you don't want to see them before the Christening then don't scroll down to the photos.
Today I made the cake pops for Charlie's christening. In case you aren't familiar cake pops are little cake lollypops, created by crumbing up a homemade cake with lots of cream cheese and buttercream icing, forming it into balls and dipping into into melted chocolate or candy melts and decorating to be whatever you like.
I have made bears as that is what we call Charlie all the time, he is our Charlie Bear.

Frankfurter and Spaghetti tricky dinner

Apologies for the quality of the photo, they steamed up the lens I think.
I saw this idea on a random blog cruising http://www.shescribes.com/2010/10/healthy-halloween-recipes-from-weelicious-coms-catherine-mccord.html and I had been looking for something slightly science-y to do with the boys today so thought this would be fun. They were pretty confused!
In case you aren't sure how this 'trick' is done, you push the uncooked spaghetti through the cold frankfurters and then boil it in water as usual until the spaghetti in soft.
I served it with a plain tomato sauce.

Marble run

This morning's making activity was building a marble run on the side of the fridge freezer (the front of a SMEG isn't magnetic) with old kitchen roll and toilet roll tubes.
First we decorated them by cutting and sticking on strips of coloured card. Then we let them dry and tried to find marble substitutes - I thought I had some but turns out I've 'lost my marbles'! I found some suitably sized beads from necklaces that have been broken by baby grabs over the years. I always save them thinking I will put them back together but I never ever have!
Then we tried to line the tubes up. I had intended on using magnets but the ones I had were nowhere near strong enough so we used sellotape instead. It was surprisingly tricky to line up. We got interrupted by tea time so we need to work on it more tomorrow - maybe Daddy will be better at that job!

Egg box Scavenger Hunt

Not a scavenger hunt for egg boxes but a scavenger hunt using an egg box to classify items found and carry them home in!
The sun was sort of out today, or at least the rain stayed away, so we went for a walk and scoot in the woods nearby. To make it a bit more focused and to try and extend the time we were there I thought we could do a scavenger hunt. Max was looking for things by colour and Ollie was searching by texture to try and adjust it to their ages, Charlie slept the whole way around.

Bubble target practice

Today we played target practice with water guns and bubbles. Max got a bit frustrated so he ended up using the litter picker to pop them. But we decided getting them from the floor was probably cheating!

Dad - This is so you can get the concept of your father's day card

Dad, you know you said you didn't realise Ollie was supposed to be handing you  the sweets on your father's day card? I have done it again (but better, to be fair) so that you can notice it this time!

Hand and Foot Painting

Today we have had fun with painting with our hands and feet and seeing what animals we can make. Here are some of the best ones we came up with. We then put them in an envelope and sent them to a poorly friend, we hope they cheer her up and she gets better soon.

Hand & Foot Lobster

Hand Dinosaur

Hand, Thumb and Finger Peacock

Hand & Thumb Giraffe

Two hand crab

Shark attack

Boys had great fun demolishing this! They even forgot to moan about the seeds! Boys and blood and gore!

Soups of the week - Aztec Black Bean & Sweet and Spicy Mexican Squash

This week's soups are pretty much as written in Thomasina Miers book  so I won't write the recipes out but they are lovely, especially the Aztec Black Bean.

Sweet and Spicy Squash soup

 Almost exactly as the recipe instructs minus the chickpeas, as I didn't have any. An I garnished with feta & sev mamra (kind of like bombay mix). And this may sound silly but it really is sweet and spicy.

Aztec Black Bean Soup

As Thomasina's recipe but I substituted chipotle paste with smoked chipotle ketchup. This is really lovely. Really like the flavour created by blackening the garlic clove and tomatoes (both skin on) in a dry pan first. Served with yoghurt, dry fried tortilla strips and coriander.

Ginger flapjack with Lime icing

Today we made an adaptation of the microwave flapjack recipe. We didn't put in any fruit but put in ground ginger ( about 1-2tsp) and a sprinkle of nutmeg. (See the other flapjack posting for the rest of the recipe)
Then we made some icing with icing sugar and lime juice and drizzled it over. A quick ginger fix and a fun activity to keep the kids busy.

Crabbing on the beach

Today is the first day of the summer holidays and according to the weather forecast the only foreseable day without rain! So we decided to grab our chance and head to Aberdour beach.
It was a bit crazy busy but we had fun.
We spent a lot of time looking for crabs. We found a LOT of jellyfish but the only crabs we found were the ones in our lunch boxes!

Cherry & Chocolate Pavlova

As we have been making so much ice cream we have loads of egg whites going begging, so I made a meringue and topped it with some whipped cream, some pitted fresh cherries (getting covered in cherry juice in the process of pitting) and grated over some cherries.
Perfectly seasonal and just as delicious as the more classic pavlovas.
If I had thought ahead I would have put a bit of cocoa in the meringue and make it a chocolate one to go with the topping

Asian steak and Noodle salad

Easy Supper - Turkey Caesar Pitta burger

Whipped these up super quick and cheaply and they were really tasty. Can't wait to

 make them again. I wasn't sure what the boys would make of caesar dressing but they really liked it.

Turkey burger

One pack turkey mince, mixed with one egg, some grated parmesan and about four mashed anchovy fillets and half a clove of garlic. Mix and form into 4 oval shaped patties. Griddle on a high heat, turning half way through until cooked through. Serve in a toasted white pitta, with some romaine lettuce leaves, some parmesan shavings and some caesar dressing.