A Very Eastery Good Friday

We managed to squeeze a lot of Eastery activities into our Good Friday this year, with egg painting in the morning and hot cross bun making in the afternoon. This was the first year the girls' decorated boiled eggs for Easter and they both loved it. Even Little was taken with it and didn't try to suck the paint brush once.

They both had lovely new egg cups from Grandma and Papa to sit their eggs in and let their creative side run wild. Poppet's design involved a lot of pink whereas Little went for a more multi-coloured approach.

I'm not sure how they will feel about flinging their eggs down a hill tomorrow; both are really fond of eggs and in particular of their painted ones. The whole practice may seem a bit twisted to them. Little especially, I am guessing, will not want to waste good food. 

In the afternoon, we tried our hand at some homemade hot cross buns for the first time. These were a big success and tasted amazing hot from the oven so we will definitely make them again in future years.

     

The dough was very sticky so Poppet only tolerated it for a short while before an extended hand washing session was called for. She loved grating the nutmeg in and rolling the lumps of dough (not sticky by this point) into balls. 

She was very excited to see "they got bigger!"after we left them to rise, and loved using the 'special pen' and 'special paint' to do the crosses (she needed some help holding the bag to squeeze it out). We did some hot 'A' buns, as well as some N, M, S, and D ones too. Tasted lovely!

Poppet: 3yrs 3mos

Little: 18mos

Baking with a toddler - Fairy Cakes

Fairy cakes are a lovely easy recipe for toddlers to have a go at and taste delicious! Poppet absolutely loves helping to make them, and even stays in the kitchen when I switch the mixer on now (previously she would run out of the room and hide behind a pillow on the sofa until I switched it off)!

This is the recipe we use:

Fairy Cakes

Makes 12

• 2 eggs (weigh these in their shells)
• an equal weight of self-raising flour
• an equal weight of stork ( or you could use softened butter)
• an equal weight of caster sugar
• 1 tsp vanilla essence
• milk if necessary

Cream together the stork and caster sugar until light and fluffy. Add the eggs one at a time along with a tablespoon of the flour and mix to combine. Add the vanilla extract and the rest of the flour and mix. At this point I sometimes add a splash of milk to loosen the mixture if it needs it.

Divide the mixture into 12 paper cases and bake in the oven at 180ºC/160ºC fan for about 20 minutes. Cool on wire rack before decorating.

Poppet is really good at carefully weighing out the ingredients now. When we first starting baking she would spill stuff everywhere but now the whole process is a lot cleaner. She talks away while she measuring and it is great for strengthening her vocabulary - 'too much' and 'little bit more' being her favourite phrases. 

Her favourite thing to do however is to crack the eggs. She is so proud of herself now that she can do it on her own. We have to fish out some bits of shell of course!

Once cooled I gave her some icing and whatever I had to hand in the baking cupboard - today it was mini marshmallows, hundreds and thousands, and glace cherries (which she refused to touch and looked at very distrustfully).

She liked putting the marshmallows "in the middle" of each cake, and licking the glace icing. I put on the butter icing as it was a bit thick for her to do it.

Enjoying the fruits of her labour

Poppet : 2yrs 4mos

Little 8 mos