baking with little ones...........

I decided to rest my hook and knitting needles and spend a few hours baking with two special little people. Daisy had come for a sleep over and Zachy had come to play and they both wanted to bake. This is quite tricky with two budding chefs who are very competitive, under four and both want to be in the thick of it, fingers into everything, mixing stirring and pushing buttons, as well as trying to eat all the mixture.

We made a big batch of sponge and flavoured some with vanilla and some with cocoa. To the vanilla we added some chocolate chips, although quite a lot of the chocolate chips went into my grandchildren's tummy's and didn't quite make the mixing bowl.

The buns were decorated with chocolate icing, mini Easter eggs and orange flavoured buttons. We also made some melting moment biscuits which they enjoyed rolling in oats.

I couldn't spend the morning baking without making one of Mr R's favourites so I rustled up a lemon cake. The biscuits and the lemon cake were from my Mary Berry cook book which my daughters bought me for Christmas - so far everything has worked really well.

The children were great and as they have quite short attention spans I was able to tempt them with an odd ten minutes watching television in between different stages of the baking. The bit between going into the oven and then being cool enough to decorate is always hard to explain - but not as hard as the challenge of waiting for the icing to set before they can start eating the finished cakes and biscuits.

It's lovely spending time with my grandchildren, I am so lucky that they want to spend time with me and seem to love baking, I've got Finn coming over for his turn in the kitchen on Sunday morning which will be fun - not sure what we are making yet.

Talk soon xxx