Poppy Makes A Reindeer Cake

Yesterday Poppy brought home a very cute cupcake she made in Preschool. It was so cute I wanted to share a picture of it!

She was very generous and shared it with her Sister and her Mummy. She is pretty good like that!

Karen x

A Very Yummy But Easy Carrot Cake Even Toddlers Can Make

We have been baking again and this time it was a very delicious carrot cake...yummy! In fact as it was soo delicious, we have entered it into Working London Mummy's One Ingredient challenge as this months challenge is carrots.

The ingredients we used were:

• 240mls vegetable oil
• 6 medium eggs, lightly whisked
• 4 medium carrots peeled & grated
• 180g light brown sugar
• 1 half tsp vanilla essence
• 330g self raising flour
• 1tsp baking powder
• 1 1/2 tsp of ground cinnamon

First pre-heat the oven to 180 degrees.

Lightly grease each tray and put them to the side for now.

Put the eggs in a large bowl, add the oil and sugar. Give a stir like so:

Next add in the grated carrot:

Add the rest of the ingredients and stir well:

It wil look something like this:

Divide between your two cake trays like so:

Bake in the oven for 30 - 40 minutes.

Once it is cooked and cooled you can prepare the filling. For this you will need:

• 200g of cream cheese (we used Philadelphia Light)
• 2tbsp icing sugar
• 1 tsp vanilla essence

Tip: it was pretty yummy but I think next time I would add either a little cinnamon or some orange juice to the mixture.

To make the filling, you just combine all the ingredients in a bowl and give it a good mix:

 You then just literally spread it on and smooth it out:

Very easy, even a three year old can do it as she demonstrates to her Sister:

 The result:

T

Apparently this was the most amazing cake we have ever baked:

Karen x

We Won A Big Top Cookie Maker

Last week I was very excited to receive a prize I had won over at The Crazy Kitchen.  It was a Big Top Cookie maker.  

We decided to make one straight away to celebrate Daddy coming home for the weekend (after 5 long weeks away). Poppy and I poured over the recipes and decided on a very large but exciting carrot cake one and I wrote all the ingredients down to take to Sainbury's.

Unfortunately I forgot my shopping list and couldn't remember what we needed. I improvised and picked up a chocolate cookie mix.  Although it may not be as impressive as the one we planned, the girls had great fun using it for the first time.

You can see for yourselves how much fun they had in this short slideshow:

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We are going to make the carrot cake one this weekend.

I am linking this in with the linky over at The Crazy Kitchen. I feel a bit of a fraud as we cheated using a packet but for some great recipes or to join in yourself you should check it out:

Karen x

For the record this is not a sponsored post. We just happened to win the big top cookie maker and had great fun using it!

Good Friends, Cookies and Coconuts

We have our very good friends and their two girls are coming today and are all very excited. In order to kill time before they get here we have been very busy.

First Poppy and I made some delicious cookies:

We hope they will like them as much as we do (of course we had to test them to make sure they were up to standard).

Next we decided to crack open a coconut we won the other evening at our Summer Ball. You can read that post here if you missed it!

First Daddy & Poppy cracked it

Then we got to drink the milk

Next to taste the coconut

Great for teething gums

Maybe not ideal for a one year old but she had fun, in fact all of us did.

We used to live opposite Steve and Fiona when we lived in Canada a few years ago. Both Fiona and I were pregnant at the same time too which brought us even closer and our little girls Poppy and Jessica were born 6 weeks apart.  We miss having them as neighbours and do wish we lived closer but do chat on the phone and keep in touch. They are going to be staying a few nights so it will be lovely.

I will let you know what we all get up to.

Karen x

Gingerbread Men And A Lot Of Fun

This week Daddy did the shopping and came back with a whole load of treats which you can see here, amomgst the treats was a gingerbread decorating kit! No it wasn't on the shopping list but neither were all the other tasty treats he brought!

Rosie always has a nap in the morning for about 1 1/2 hours and we call this Mummy/Poppy time.  We try and do sticking, painting, gluing, play dough or cooking, all the messy things that Rosie isn't ready for yet! Anyway yesterday Poppy & I set about decorating them and had great fun.

We had lots of smarties, sugar strands and icing sugar that looked like a tube of glue and she had to concentrate very hard:

I didn't take lots of photos of her making them as I was all sticky too but here they are finished:

Next we had to eat them.  Poppy demonstrates the best way to do this.  First you have to eat all the smarties one by one:

Next you lick off all the sugar sprinkles..yummy:

Then you bite his arms off, one by one:

And then you bite his legs off so he looks like this:

Finally you get to eat the rest! so even though it wasn't something that would usually make its way into our shopping trolley, we had a really enjoyable morning and Poppy loved her tasty snack! Thank you Daddy!

Karen x