Smooth-Slushy

I found a great way to use up bananas that are starting to turn. At this time of year they just don't last very long. As soon as they start to brown take the skin off and put them in the freezer. Use the frozen bananas to make smoothies. They come out like slushies. Lovely on a really hot day.

My staple smoothies is made up of:

• apple juice
• the juice of one orange
• a whole banana
• a handful of frozen berries - usually raspberries or summer berries

Blend all the ingredients together. Taste and add more ingredients if desired. I sometimes add yoghurt.

The girls help by squishing the orange, breaking up the banana and adding berries until I say STOP!

Strawberry Empires

The end of term was coming for Elizabeth at Nursery. It suddenly occurred to me that I should probably sort out a gift for her teachers. I had a brief look at the suggested gifts in Tesco, they were mostly chocolates and mugs etc. For Christmas we made them gingerbread biscuits in the shape of Christmas trees and they had gone down well, so I thought we could bake them a gift again.

I asked Elizabeth what she thought we should do, and she suggested the Christmas tree gingerbread biscuits. So I asked her if there was a more summer appropriate theme. So we went through a few ideas like suns, or sunflowers and settled on strawberries!

I Googled some pictures of strawberries and drew my own templates:

I made Empire Biscuits this time, instead of the gingerbread biscuits.

Ingredients:
150g butter
50g sugar
200g self raising flour
Strawberry jam to sandwich in the middle of 2 biscuits
Icing sugar, water with lots and lots of red food colouring for the top of the biscuits
Chocolate sprinkles for the strawberry seeds
Green fondant icing for the stalk

Method:
Cream the butter and sugar together.
Add the flour and mix into a dough.
Flour the surface before rolling the dough out to about 3 or 4 mm thick.
Cut into shapes.
Cook in the oven for about 12 minutes at 160 degrees (fan) until a light golden brown colour.
Once cooled, assemble and decorate!

I made about 10 biscuits, there are so many helpers in the nursery that I was unsure how many people I was catering for. I wrapped them up in tissue paper and bought a nice box to present them in.
They were a big hit! Almost all of the other gifts had been boxes of chocolates and they were getting a bit fed up with them, so this was a nice change.
I think if I did them again I would make them smaller, they were a bit big.

Empire Biscuits are such easy and fun biscuits to make with children. I made these strawberry ones mostly by myself because they were a gift. But usually the girls get to roll out the dough and use whatever biscuit cutters they want to cut the biscuits out. Then they love spreading the jam and decorating the finished biscuits.

Unikitty Treats

Rainy days in the summer holidays are perfect days for baking projects!

Inspired by Nerdy Nummies Snickers Pops we made our own Lego Movie Unikitty Treats.

Elizabeth loves to watch Rosanna Pansino's Nerdy Nummies channel on YouTube. As a result of that, and my own interest in baking, she is now very interested in baking and cooking and can often be found sat on the kitchen counter beside me.

This is the second of Nerdy Nummies projects that has inspired me to try my own version.

The Nerdy Nummies version uses a funsize snickers bar, I decided to base mine on Nigella Lawson's Marshmallow Crispy Squares instead. I also decided to take it a step further and make the whole Unikitty instead of just the head.

What you need:

• Nigella's Marshmallow Crispy Squares use mixed white and pink mini marshmallows to make them pink. Cut them into rectangle shapes. Eat the cut offs, these are yummy treats on their own!
• White chocolate, melted 
• for making the white feet and the bottom of the head white
• and to stick down all the fondant and chocolate pieces etc
• Coloured fondant icing 
• red for the ears, mouth, nose and cheeks
• blue and white for the horn and blue for the tail
• green for the neck
• white chocolate buttons for the eyes
• milk chocolate drops for the eyes
• melted plain chocolate for the eye lashes. Use a piping bag to draw the these.
• I also used the arm of a gingerbread man cutter to cut out the middle of the body.

This is how she looks in the Lego Movie, for those that haven't seen it:

I'm pretty pleased with the results. Elizabeth helped by dipping the crispy squares into the white chocolate, rolling out the fondant icing and she drew the eyelashes on some of our Unikitty Treats. Rebecca helped by eating the ingredients!