A bit of Shortbread

I have tried making shortbread before and it was a mess! Icing sugar everywhere and awful tasting biscuits. I had a friend and her family popping round so I wanted to make something and it seemed like a good idea to make something I wasn't confident at. 

I found this recipe in one of my many cook books and it is brilliant. It might be my fantastic new cake mixer or new kitchen but the recipe is pretty great too.

I will double check the ingredients, but from memory it was

220 grams of butter

220 grams icing sugar and 

350 grams of flour.

Cream butter and sugar and slowly add flour. Bake for 30 mins on low oven, I set mine to 150. And that was all the directions.

And they are all gone. I think I will be making them again.

Tx

Spotty Cake

A little collection of brightly coloured balls of cake.

I brought off trade me a cake pops making set. Its great for making balls of cake. I made a set of colours, I think a tray makes 8 balls and after each time I added more food colouring to get a whole lot of different shades of colour. For Adele, the insides of the cake was blue and white and the balls green and purple.

To get the spots inside the cake, you make the balls and then add them to the raw batter and cook the cake. I also make spotty cupcakes. You can see the balls sitting in the cupcake cases. I made vanilla cake and chocolate cupcakes.

Yummy balls of cake. Even though the balls end up being baked twice they don't seem to dry out at all. 

These made such a cool addition to the table of goodies. The kids were all comparing their insides. Teamed with bright pink icing and glitter they made a beautiful looking cupcake. And quite tasty too. In my opinon of course ;)

Tx

Photo Challenge Week Two

What makes me smile. Of course I had to try and get some photos of the kids, they make me smile (and frown, and mad and....). It is a public holiday here in New Zealand so I took the kids to the gardens and followed them round while they were playing and took photos. I had not been there for a number of years and had a great time looking at all the roses and the green house and well every where. AND we saw frogs. How cool!

So that is my photo for this week.

It has been a crazy week, school started back for the kids, Adele had her first day and she loves it so far. Ryans pleased with his teacher and the kids in his class. I have great feelings about this year. Ryan has signed up to do Speech and Drama, I have a feeling this will be gold for him.

She looks so tiny compared to Ryan.

We are busy packing up our house. We move in a week. Crazy, feels so unreal. I can't wait at all. I have packed away all my sewing stuff, ready to go crazy in my new sewing room. Not long at all.

Tx

And Five done

Today was the day of the big party. As quick as a flash it was all over. All done, my middle baby is 5. She is so exited about school on Tuesday. So excited in fact she has been practising her walk with her back pack on. She is trying to work out if she will walk or skip. Oh the dilemma!

For her party we invited a few of her kindy friends and a bunch of kids she has known through Playcentre, school (making friends with Ryan's friends siblings), coffee group and the like. It ended up with 17 kids and we didn't even go crazy with the inviting. Its nice to have a good core group of friends, who are friends who have kids.

  You can't really see it, but the green tray is a super cool mini milk bottle carrier. I love the milk bottles. I filled them with chocolate milk. The kids guzzled it down.

Her party was mermaid themed, I tried to do everything blue, purple and green. All the way down to the straws and the cake.

I made a simple butter cake and butter cream icing. I made another spotty cake. My oven I have in the rental is terrible, so the cake took for ever to make. But I am so happy with how it turned out. It had a bit of a wow factor, but of course by the time you get to cake all the little bellies are filled and we have loads of cake left.

Oh and I put shells all over the tables, they seemed to be mermaid-ish to me.

Tissue paper decorations in the colours. I think Adele liked it.

The car of course wasn't there, but under the sun shade I set up a nail stand. I grabbed all my polishes and just put them on the table, with tissues and remover and the kids where either going crazy on the castle or painting their nails, including the boys.

And I set a bunch of flowers on the table. I texted Bair to grab some and he came home with the perfect colour. Light purple. Fantastic!!

So tomorrow I will share how I make the spotty cake. Complete with the butter cake recipe.

Well thats all done now. I feel sad that school is about to start, but I know that she is so ready and keen for it. She is a super star and I love her to bits.

Tx