Birthday cake and jelly

(You probably already know that when Brits say jelly they mean jello. But I thought I'd mention it just in case anyone is reading this hoping for a jam-type jelly recipe.)

So yes, we made birthday jellies and birthday cake. Mainly because I really wanted to try out our new jelly mold/muffin tins. And I also wanted a birthday cake, of course. We made Cranham Honey Cake, which involves glacé cherries. I love glacé cherries.

Blue impossible pie

Today Froglet and I decided to use up some leftover coconut by making impossible pie. And since ABC&123 are looking for blue or brown activities, we decided to make it blue. Hopefully they've not beaten me to posting this time! *laughs*

When I say we decided, I mean I decided. Because I, and not my son, am the boss, despite his apparent disagreement. Just because you are steadfast in your belief does not mean that you are right, Froglet.

Impossible pie, in case you've not come across it before, is named thus because it's a self-cruster. My recipe asked for a 10 inch pie dish (25 cm), but mine was 11 inch (28 cm). How is that possible? Or should I have measured the base rather than the rim? Anyway, we also have tiny pie dishes so I halved the recipe and used five of those, although I think six would have been better.

The halved recipe runs as follows:

2 eggs
25 g (1 oz) margarine
1/2 tsp vanilla essence
1/4 tsp baking powder
1/4 cup plain flour
1/2 cup coconut
1 cup milk
1 cup sugar
1/2 cup sugar
pinch of salt (1/8 tsp!)

and blue food colouring, of course. We added the blue colouring to the milk, and then added some more when it was all blended because it looked more green than blue.

My cup measure is 250 ml, in case you're using different cups.

Blend all together, pour into greased pie dishes (4 inches/10 cm), bake at 160 C for about 40 minutes (fan assisted oven). The original recipe said 175 C for 1 hour, but that was for the full recipe in a large pie dish so I adjusted. You may need to fiddle with this a bit for your oven.

When it was all cooked, the coconut was supposed to end up on top, the eggy bit in the middle and the crust on the bottom... and it did! Very thin crust, but I think it was always thin.

I will have these pieces, and two of that one, Mummy.

I'm happy to say it met with approval!

Baking this week: Nussheckli, or Swiss nut cookies

I happened across these on the internet and the author asks not to be reproduced without permission so if you want the exact recipe please visit her own blog. She has a photo too, so you can compare!

I'll just say that the basic ingredients are nuts, sugar, eggs and flour. These seem to be the main ingredients in a lot of Swiss recipes! These cookies caught my eye because they claim to be native to our canton. I've never seen them or heard of them but that means nothing as we have few local Swiss friends - most are immigrants from other cantons. So Froglet and I thought we'd make a half-quantity in case we didn't like them...

Mixing - Pretty round and heart-shaped balls - Um...???

We don't think they were supposed to all run together like that. Maybe we should have spaced them further apart, or most likely my measuring was at fault. Swiss recipes seem to need precision - well they are Swiss after all! As we don't own a weighing scale, and I seldom have all the ingredients that I need, my baking usually goes something like "100 g - let's say a cup - of flour or sugar. 100 g - roughly half a cup - of butter. Chopped nuts? We've got ground nuts, that'll do. Eggs can be replaced with bananas*..." and so on. I did not replace the eggs in this recipe though - pretty sure that wouldn't work!

The finished product:

Not quite how they're meant to look! But still tasty.

*A vegan friend taught us this. The ratio is one well-mashed banana for two eggs, if the eggs are mainly being used to bind rather than to raise (and you don't mind the taste of bananas, of course). Try making banana bread or chocolate cake with this substitution, it's yummy! Excellent way of using up those going-black bananas that no one wants to eat. You can also use apple sauce, I think it's 1/4 cup for one egg, but I prefer banana.

Edited to add: We are linking up this post to Simply Made Sunday retrospectively. Click the button to find out all about it!

Muffin Tin Monday

I have seen posts relating to the MTM blog carnival in several places, but most recently at Chronicle of an Infant Bibliophile, one of the blogs I follow. The idea is simple - serve a themed meal in a muffin tin, then post a link to the blog entry concerning it at Her Cup Overfloweth if you want to be part of the carnival. I don't know whether this is meant to be just a fun thing to do or whether it's to try and encourage children to eat.

Froglet always has trouble staying in one place long enough to finish a meal (or even get halfway through it), so today I thought we might give MTM a try. This week was Choose Your Own Theme, rather fortuitously as it was such a last-minute decision to do it and I haven't done the weekly shop yet! So the theme I've picked is: Homemade.

Our muffin tin contains both Froglets meal and my own, as it's rather a large tin. Homemade brown bread with nuts in, homemade kumquat marmalade from our little tree, homemade snickerdoodle cookies - rolled in cinnamon sugar by Froglet - and homegrown salad: cress, baby nasturtium leaves (because the nasturtiums are still tiny), marjoram and oregano. Like I said, it was a last-minute thing!

Surprisingly, the salad was Froglet's favourite item. He wolfed down the marjoram, oregano and nasturtiums, exclaiming"these taste funny!", then asked for more. I had to explain that we couldn't take any more leaves off the nasturtiums as it might stress them too much, if they aren't already stressed. I only took one leaf off each plant.

As a method of getting him to concentrate and eat, it was unsuccessful, but he certainly enjoyed seeing all the things we had made and grown ourselves on his "plate". We will be doing this again, and if you have little ones maybe you'd like to join in too!

For lots of different themes, pop over to Her Cup Overfloweth and see what other mums have done.

Water play

Today Froglet decided he would like to play with water on the balcony. I found him some water and various cups and pots, and then thought of giving him a paintbrush too, as I have read about painting walls with water on several other blogs recently.
After a while, he asked if he could paint the windows too. My first response was of course no, but then I remembered the old squeegee that lives in our shower... one sponge and some soapy water later, hey presto, free window cleaning.

Not very successful in terms of the result, but the process was greatly enjoyed and gave me some time to have an adult conversation with our visiting friend. I think we might do some more window-cleaning tomorrow!

In other news, I have discovered that when you don't own a mixer, you should not try to hand-mix two loaves-worth of bread dough. It does not work with a fork (my usual implement), and if you resort to using your hands it makes them so sticky that you can't do anything and have to get your husband to scrape the dough off them with a spatula. Which doesn't really work either.
Still, the loaves look nice enough. I do love baking. It beats cleaning hands-down.