Painted table

Like a lot of parents with young children, I bought the £17 Ikea table and chairs for my children. It's wooden and cheap, so I was happy for the children to draw on it to their hearts' content and leave all the other furniture and walls alone. It got to a point where I was a a bit embarrassed by the state of it, and it was relegated to under the stairs until I could clean it up.

Today was the day that the poor little table was given a new lease of life. I finally managed to paint it and it looks so much better! I took it apart and used an ivory spray enamel paint to cover the scratched and chipped top. I used 3 coats of red acrylic paint on the legs and sides, then put it all back together again. Now to start on the chairs.

The Bowser Suit

It was my daughter's 5th birthday last week and she requested a Super Mario party. She wanted to dress up as Mario, which was simple, and we bought an outfit for her. She wanted daddy to dress up as Bowser for the party. Not so simple. Daddy agreed, and spent the best part of 6 weeks making his outfit from scratch. When he got to the body, hands and feet, my skills as seamstress were put to the test as I not only made all the patterns for the pieces, I also taught daddy how to help with the sewing. After 3 weeks of doing a bit at a time, and with a couple of hours to spare before the party started we finished it. Here is the result.

Sorry the picture is taken in the middle of a messy room, so the costume does not stand out so much, but all the pictures at the party had other people's children in them and I didn't want to post them on here without consent.

Blackberry pudding

I made a pie for dinner yesterday, but after egg washing the crust, I couldn't throw the rest of the beaten egg away. I decided to try the traditional sponge recipe of weighing the egg and adding equal weights of SR flour, caster sugar and margarine. The small amount of mixture was just enough to spread over the base of my 2lb loaf tin to make a small rectangular cake.
I had some blackberries on hand, which I heated up in a pan with a few spoonfuls of sugar.
Once the blackberries were sticky and the sugar had all melted I poured them (and the syrup that was formed) into the oiled loaf tin and put the cake mix on top.
I baked it for about 20 minutes at 180c and then tipped it out while it was still hot on to a plate to cool a little.
It was delicious with vanilla ice cream.

Story dice

I have been busy with work, I forgot how draining it is to be in that routine. When you add to that the emotional drain of working with young children all day, I have been pretty tired! I am loving it, though, and the children are giving me even more ideas of things to make - I just need some time to actually do it.

I love the idea of story dice. In fact, I bought some of Rory's Story Cubes in Waterstones a few weeks ago, but soon realised that my children needed slightly different pictures to get their minds working. How hard could it be to make my own? Not hard at all, as it turned out. The tricky part is working out the 54 images you want on the dice. Luckily, I had two willing assistants shouting random words at me until I had enough to work with.

I bought some blank dice online, with indented faces, so the pictures were protected. I googled various images with the phrase "free ............. vector art" which generally brings up silhouette images which are perfect for this. I saved the free images and in photoshop I made each one just over 1cm square to fit on a die face, then printed them, cut them out and stuck them on the blank dice. I guess I could have drawn each image and stuck it on, which would have been more personal, but as the title of my blog shows, I do "cheat" occasionally!

Back to work

I have been fortunate enough to spend the past 6 years at home raising my children. This has given me the time to be creative with them as well as for them. I have relearned how to cook and bake without using dairy products and more recently I have been able to enjoy craft and art activities with them. Now they are both settled in school, I need more to do in the day than making and baking.

So, from 7th January, I shall be back in the full-time work force. Luckily, I shall be working school hours and term times only so I won't need to arrange child care, but I won't have the time to be so creative and the blog is likely to suffer. I am sure I will be updating from time to time, so look out for updates, but for the first couple of months back in work I'm likely to be too shattered to even open the laptop!

Snowflakes and more

Today's Christmas task on our advent calendar was to make paper snowflakes to go on the windows. I have made them in the past and let the girls stick them on, but this year they made their own for the first time, and loved it. We also made some strings of Christmas things - robins, trees, reindeer and angels. Charlotte was amazed at the hearts that were made when we cut certain shapes out of the paper and was soon busy throwing them around the room like confetti.

Chocolate ginger cupcakes

A fair few months ago I went to a friend's baby shower and her sister-in-law had made a selection of delicious cakes. My favourite were her chocolate ginger cupcakes, a name which does not begin to describe the mix of flavours hiding inside. I made a version of them for the cake sale at the school Christmas Market today, here is the recipe.

Ingredients

4oz brown sugar
5oz self raising flour
1/4tsp bicarbonate of soda
1tsp ground ginger
1/2tsp ground cinnamon
1/4tsp ground nutmeg
4oz soya margarine
2 eggs
2tbsp golden syrup
3oz dark chocolate, coarsely chopped

Method

Sift the dry ingredients into a bowl, then add the eggs, margarine and syrup.
Whisk with an electric whisk until smooth then add the chocolate and mix together.
Spoon into 12 cupcake cases and bake at 150c for about 20 minutes, until cooked through.

When cool, the original recipe calls for whipped cream on top with chopped Crunchie bars sprinkled on top. I made frosting with philadelphia, butter and icing sugar, then sprinkled the Crunchie on top. To make them dairy-free, I have spooned cooled, melted dairy-free chocolate over the top, then topped with chopped honeycomb pieces.