Pancake Day

I thought I would share my favourite pancake recipe and ideas with you today.

First of all I use my trusty Be-Ro recipe for pancake mix,  adding a little more milk will give you a crepe like consistency if you like them thin and crispy (as I do, but I have to cater for the masses).

Then onto filling, without a doubt my most indulgent, feel like a pig, but oh my it tastes so wonderful is Nutella and Clotted Cream...it is amazing you can literally taste the calories but I don't care it's one day of the year.

I also love them savoury and my favourite recipe for them is Spinach and Ricotta, they can be made super simple by buying the pancakes and sauce ready made, you have to just put everything together. Or you can make from scratch if you have time with a simple tomato pasta sauce.

I also love them simple with just lemon/orange and sugar on, although I never manage to get the juice to sugar ratio and am always disappointed so I tend to now go for Nutella or the other favourites Maple or Golden Syrup!

Mmm whose idea was it to save having the pancakes until tonight, I am now salivating at the thought of them!

I will post some pictures later but for now, happy pancake day :)

Birthday Cupcakes

It is my daughters first birthday in a few weeks and I all I have ready is the church hall we are having it in.

So at the weekend I gave making some birthday cupcakes a go, they came out looking pretty good! Not as good as a professional by any stretch of the imagination but still for an amateur I think they look OK.

The recipes I used to make these masterpieces are:

For the cakes I use the basic Be-Ro Victoria Sponge recipe, super simple and usually works every time. I use the all in one method of just bunging everything in the food mixer.

For the icing I used a simple buttercream recipe, it needs to be a good piping consistency, too dry and it will crack too wet and it won't pipe and just run!

I then used a Wilton 1M nozzle and pipe to make a swirl, starting from the outside and working inwards, a demo of this can be found on the Wilton website.

I have found some sprinkles on a few websites but have been looking for some that don't contain any E numbers, last thing I need is loads of hyperactive children running about!

Anyway the result is this...

Things to do with the children!

We have all been full of cold this last week and it hasn't exactly be great weather so we have been doing a lot of indoor activities.

I thought I would share a few and if you have any posts with your ideas or favourite things to do then please feel free to leave a comment with your link.

On Saturday we made gingerbread men, you may have seen my Silent Sunday well this was the outcome. The ones with the smartie eyes all went first though I am afraid, the recipe was a simple one from my trusty, battered and well used Be-ro book!

I am not a fan of gingerbread so we made some fairy cakes yesterday, again a simple victoria sponge recipe from the Be-ro book and then we added some lemon flavoured glacé icing and some vanilla buttercream I had left over. These are great for the kids as they can help to make the cake mix, set out the cases and then decorate them.

Ready for icing

Can you tell which one I did? Just practising my piping skills!

Next we have been up the garden this afternoon to collect some leaves, we are just waiting for them to dry off a bit and then will either paint them and do some printing or just stick straight onto a sheet of paper for an autumnal picture.

This time last year we made some Christmas cards for family, we traced my sons hand round some felt and then cut out and made into pictures of Santa or Robins using the hand as the beard or body. You could use paint but at the time I was heavily pregnant and couldn't be bothered with the mess!

I will probably do something similar this year but not sure what yet :)