Edible Child Safe Sparklers

Last year I made Edible Sparklers with Mini and we made just a few, but this year it was like a production line and we have made enough for both Mini and Maxi's class at school!

Ingredients

Bread sticks

Chocolate

Cake Sprinkles

Hundreds and thousands

We melted the chocolate in the microwave and added some honey to make sure it didn't set too fast on us. 

 

We then used a silicone brush to cover the bread stick with some chocolate and covered the coated part in decorations.

 Leave them to set and voila, child safe edible sparklers.

Cooking with Children - Halloween Cakes and Biscuits

I love cooking and baking with the boys and for me the secret is letting go and dealing with the mess afterwards, plus good planning, making sure all the ingredients are out and the equipment etc.  I think that by empowering the boys to cook and bake it will stand them in good stead as they get older, plus they can start cooking dinner and feed me!
 

Also it might not look perfect, but I can assure you it tastes mighty fine.  So I bring you Maxi's chocolate cakes and biscuits.

Basic Biscuit Recipe

I use one without egg and it is fine if over handled, so perfect for children

175g/6oz Plain Flour
100g/4oz Butter or Margarine
50g/2oz Caster Sugar
Pre-heat oven to 180

Cream the butter or margarine and caster sugar
Stir in the flour and once mixed knead the dough together until it forms a ball
Roll out the dough on a lightly floured surface until it is about 5mm thick

Spooky Chocolate Web Cakes

6 oz margarine
6 oz caster sugar
5 oz self raising floor
1 oz coco powder
1 tsp Baking Powder
1 egg
2 tablespoons milk
Icing Sugar
Hot water

Cream margarine and sugar
Add eggs, flour, coco powder and baking powder, then 2 tbls of milk
Cook for 15 minutes at 180 degrees.

To make the web, mix icing sugar and hot water and cover the cake.  Create a swirl in black icing (we used Silver Spoon Black Designer Icing kindly supplied by Silver Spoon) and then take a cocktail stick and drag the icing out towards the edge.

These cakes are all Maxi's own work and they looked fantastic and tasted even better!

I would like to say thank you to Silver Spoon for supplying me and the boys with some of their cake decorating goodies.

We are entering in the Big Autumn Bakeoff with this!

Cooking with Children - Lamb Stir-Fry

 We were given a some welsh lamb and the ingredients to make a welsh lamb stir fry from the Cool2Cook2 book which has been produced by Meat Promotion Wales (Hybu Cig Cymru) to help get kids cooking.

I love getting the boys in the kitchen, so we set about following the recipe on Saturday evening.  The boys chopped all the vegetables, whilst I did the ginger and MadDad prepared the lamb, which was welsh and organic.

I have to say that the recipe was really easy to follow and the boys did the majority of the work, with me and MadDad supervising.

We really enjoyed it and there was 4 empty bowls at the end of the evening.  In fact the boys enjoyed it so much that we made Lamb Kofta Kebabs out of the book for Sunday dinner.

They went down a treat.  If you can get hold of this cook book then I would, it has some very easy, well balanced recipes in it and the MiniMads want to try them all and I can see it being used time and time again, especially when they are a little older and I can get them to cook dinner for us all!