Baking Fun

Yesterday we had a great afternoon of baking and things. First we started by making raspberry jelly with mandarins - ugh, not a combination I would recommend but the girls loved it! Then we got on to the more serious issue of Grandma's belated birthday gift.

Our Mission - to bake some ginger biscuits and put in a pretty tin for her. So here we go...

Find the right page, check through the recipe, oh yes, sitting on the chair like that will be ever so helpful to our baking CassCass! Start weighing masses of flour - 300g seems quite a lot - check the recipe and realise you are baking 60 biscuits! Wow! Pour the flour in the bowl, then add the bicarbonate of soda and the ginger powder and grate in plenty of fresh cinammon from the West Indies! Now time for the marge, then the sugar...uh oh, we don't have enough! Scrape every last grain of sugar left in the house (3 varieties!) then realise you were supposed to keep some for the end. Oops! Doesn't matter, says LissaLou (her favourite saying!) Time for her favourite part, cracking the eggs! Into the mixture it goes, then goes in the gooey sticky syrup before squeezing in some lemon. Get LissaLou to photo me pouring the dry mixture into the moist...oops, where did that mixture go?
Ah, thanks for the lovely shot of mummy, LissaLou! Hey, here's CassCass come to give a helping hand! (Can you tell she has no clothes on by this point?!) LissaLou gives us her imitation of a pig, then gets back to the serious job of mixing. Now we're nearing the end - butter the baking tray, Put on dollops of mixture, pop them in the oven and...hey presto, look what we have! Add a bit of tissue paper to the tin and it is a present fit for a Queen! (Didn't quite make 60 in the end, perhaps 45? And as I was baking 6 at a time it took quite a while!)

Well, that was such fun, we thought we would move on to some more cooking. Baby JoJo slept all through this activity and CassCass played beautifully with Happyland.

Right, this time our job was to make some Bang Bang Chicken, as found in one of my favourite children's cookbooks by Annabel Karmel. And just why is it called Bang Bang, I hear you ask? Well, that's because you begin by giving the chicken a real good thumping!

So once that is accomplished, prepare the way for the dunking... Flour in one bowl, egg in next and breadcrumbs with parmesan and parsley in the final one. Then in those battered bits of chicken go from one bowl to the next! That's right LissaLou, give them a good swish around in those breadcrumbs! Oh, and just look at those messy hands! Then it's time to fry them in some oil before serving up with new potatoes and salad. Umm, yummy!
Or so you would think. Unfortunately LissaLou didn't even like them after all that hard work! I thought they were great, but not quite as good as my friend Emma used to make...ah well!