Category: Pudding

Ophelia’s favourite story is Each Peach Pear Plum by Janet and Allan Ahlberg. She will wander around the house saying any combination of the title fruits and often I think she is asking for a snack and she wants a story instead and vice versa! In all fairness, I think she decides that she wants the opposite of whatever I suggest and does it to fluster me… She can be quite contrary. Just reading that back makes me think I have become cynical in my old age. I never used to have a cynical bone in my body, but since having children there are times when I find myself thinking something and I end up questioning where the cynicism came from. But that is another story…

Seeing as my daughter loves the aforementioned book so very much I thought it was about time it was incorporated into our baking repertoire. My initial thought was that a lovely big pie would be really yummy. But the kids really do enjoy stamping out pastry circles and placing them in the bun tray so much that little pies won out. That and it meant we could top them with stars which is always well received. As the children (yes Atticus I am talking about you) are very hit and miss with cooked fruit, I decided that we would mix in honey, flaked almonds and chocolate chips in as all the little people in our house love them.

Ingredients

For the pastry

• 400g plain flour
• 100g icing sugar
• 170g butter
• 2 egg yolks

For the filling

• 1 peach (stone removed)
• 1 pear (cored)
• 1 plum (stone removed)
• 2tsbp honey
• 25g flaked almonds
• 50g chocolate chips

Method

1. In a bowl, squish and squash the butter until it is soft.
2. Sift the icing sugar into to it (to make it snow!)
3. Rub the icing sugar with the butter with your fingers or mix together with a wooden spoon.
4. Add the egg yolk and mix it well with a wooden spoon.
5. Add the flour and gently mix with the wooden spoon.
6. Use your hands to bring the dough together.
7. Wrap in clingfilm and place in the fridge while you make the filling and put the oven on to heat at 180° fan.
8. Chop the fruit with and put in a bowl.
9. Add the honey, flaked almonds and chocolate chips and mix.
10. Remove the pastry from the fridge and roll out to the thickness of a pound coin.
11. Grease your shallow bun tin. Cut out circles to fit inside your shallow bun tin and gently press in.
12. Spoon around 1tsp of filling into Each Peach Pear Plum Pie (Simon was adamant that this line had to appear in this post!).
13. Choose a cookie cutter (shape of your choice – we usually use stars or hearts) that will fit across the little pies. It doesn’t matter if some of the filling is exposed.
14. Brush the sides of all the pies with milk to stick the top on and then brush the tops with milk.
15. Bake for 20-25 minutes until the pastry is golden. Remove from the oven and allow to cool.

These little pies were really yummy and as they were small I could eat a whole pie without feeling guilty. I can see us making little pies like this nearer Christmas potentially with a more festive filling. I can’t believe I am thinking of mince pies in August! Oh well.

I have included an aftermath photo earlier in the article so that you know that it isn’t all perfect in our kitchen when I cook with the kids. It isn’t always this messy, and yes it does take time to clear it all up, but in my head, the memories we all make outweigh any trouble. Also my kids do quite enjoy helping with the washing up, wiping the surfaces and trying to sweep the floor. I have my own little army of helpers in training.

My children seem to be magnets for mud and dirt and grime and I seem to spend my day telling whichever child or children I am with to go and wash their hands or face. This request is generally met with furious indignation and the retort that they are clean and how unfair mummy is.

When Atticus’s nursery brought my attention to the fact that Friday 29 June is International Mud Day I was really happy. In our house,  playing in the mud equates to the boys in the unassigned flower beds digging for treasure and worms and Ophelia trying to climb undetected closer to the raspberry canes (regardless of season) to steal the fruit! I have three little explorers set on conquering my garden, having a good time in nature and with each other so it is a win-win in my book.

My original plan to mark this muddy occasion, had been to make a deliciously decadent dark chocolate torte and let the children decorate it. Then I figured that the kids would probably prefer this recipe as it involves biscuit crushing and super speedy whisking Angel Delight with the rotary whisk and sweetie worms, so from their perspective what’s not to love?! This recipe is definitely more child-friendly and less of a chance of me having to exert super-human will power to prevent myself from eating a whole chocolate torte!

I have been making this recipe since Seb, now 5, was about 18 months. This was the first time that Ophelia had a chance to try out the rotary whisk. I have to admit she was a bit puzzled and needed help, but there were shrieks of delight coming from both her and Atticus as she started learning how to operate it. We also found that this recipe gave Atticus the opportunity to use fun adjectives  to describe the mixture, words used include: frothy as well as bubbly and fluffy. He also said; “bash the biscuit to smithereens” as he was crushing the biscuit.

Ingredients

Makes 4 puddings or 3 big ones. We serve these in small glasses so the kids can see the layers.

• 4 Bourbon biscuits (essentially 1 per pudding)
• 1 pack of chocolate Angel Delight
• 300ml cold milk
• The Natural Confectionary Company Jelly Snakes (we called them worms though!)

Method

1. Put the Angel Delight powder into a medium-sized bowl and add the milk. Whisk and mix around until the powder has dissolved in the milk and it is all frothy like a thick milkshake. Place the bowl in the fridge until it is next needed.
2. Put the Bourbon biscuits into a ziplock bag and bash and crush them with a rolling pin or wooden spoon until they are fine crumbs. It is ok to have some bigger bits too, but you may struggle to convince your child to stop crushing them!
3. Put a tablespoon of the crushed biscuits into each glass.
4. Take the Angel delight out of the fridge and divide it equally between the glasses. With my children, this involved many spillages and requests to lick the spoon.  They were allowed to do the latter once we had finished.
5. Divide the remaining Bourbon biscuits between the glasses and decorate them with the worms.
6. Place in the fridge until ready to eat.

Needless to say, these puddings were really welcome after a long day; nice and cold straight from the fridge in this exceptionally warm weather we have been experiencing. I think the glasses were cleared in record time for a pudding! I hope your little explorers have as much fun with this recipe as mine do.

We got some big and beautiful strawberries last week and they were such a vibrant colour and smelt just like British summer time that I decided they were too pretty to just eat. I wanted the kids to showcase them and put them centre stage in our pudding one evening.

It seemed natural to combine them with Nutella. As we are a house with small children, we take Nutella pretty seriously; no small jars thank you – always the 1kg jar for us! I do say due to the children, but if I can tell you a secret, I had a jar of Nutella on my desk at work for when I was having a bad day, so maybe some of it is me too… We shan’t dwell on that one though!

Enter the idea of Nutella cheesecake stuffed strawberries. This is a recipe that I adapted after seeing a recipe on another website (see link below). I have to admit part of this recipe is a bit intricate and the kids didn’t do that part, but that said they had a lot of fun with the rest as an after school and nursery activity and they were a really tasty treat for a midweek pudding.

While the boys were at their respective daytime activities and Ophelia was eating lunch I went about removing the centre of the strawberries. Yes it is a weird concept and it was a bit fiddly. I had to pay a strawberry tax to my daughter so she took the tops I had sliced of and the couple which went wrong at the beginning. She then had a tantrum as I wouldn’t let her eat the rest of them!

Ingredients

Recipe adapted from Pinch of Nom

• 1 pack of large strawberries (it is easier to remove the centre of a large strawberry)
• 3tbsp Nutella
• 3tbsp cream cheese
• 1 digestive biscuit

I didn’t add any sugar as I concluded that the Nutella would make it sweet enough. It is a bit of a gloopy mixture so they do need to be kept in the fridge. If you need more filling, just add more of the Nutella and cream cheese in equal amounts. The children enjoyed eating the bits which didn’t fit into the strawberries!

Method

1. Adult in advance: slice the top off all the strawberries and carefully score around the inside of the strawberry in a circle. Carefully with the tip of the knife or a teaspoon scoop out the middle of the strawberry. Be careful not to make any big tears in the wall of the strawberry. Some of ours had little tears and they survived OK. Either eat the middle bits or

   

   save them for the kids (here is where I admit that I ate them all!). Place in the fridge until you are ready to use them.

2. Measure out the Nutella and cream cheese into a bowl and thoroughly mix. Fill the strawberries with a teaspoon and return to the fridge until you are ready to eat them.
3. Crush the biscuit in a zip lock bag and sprinkle crushed digestive over each strawberry just before serving as the biscuit will go soft in the fridge.

The children were kind enough to share these yummy creations with both mummy and daddy. I did have to watch them like a hawk so they didn’t try and eat more than their share! There is no denying that they have all inherited my love for both strawberries and Nutella!

Popcorn is fun. My kids tell me it is fun with their squeals of delight when I suggest we have a film evening complete with popcorn. We have a popcorn maker which I tend to use because the popping sound it generates when it is working makes me smile and I find it mesmerising watching the recently popped corn spilling out of it.

After reading the previous paragraph I guess you can probably picture the enthusiasm and excitement oozing from my children when I announced that I had an idea for a recipe that included popcorn on top of it.

Now I have had this recipe idea in my head since I started the blog, but I am not a huge fan of cheesecake so I had been putting off making the recipe. That was until I saw Seb inhale a slice of cheesecake at lightning speed at a friend’s house and then I thought it should probably make its way up to the top sooner rather than later. As it happens, we had the grandparents round on Bank Holiday Monday (our front garden is looking a lot less neglected now thank you!) and I thought it would be a good opportunity to try the recipe out and spread the calories around and as a thank you for the manual labour (because essential that is what gardening is) they did. It would have been rude not too, especially when they babysat in the evening too!

Ingredients

Unsurprisingly it was the boys’ choice to include chocolate into these mini cheesecakes you could always omit it if you prefer plain cheesecake. This recipe will make 12 mini cheesecakes.

For the base

• 85g digestive biscuits
• 45g melted butter/margarine
• 1tsp cocoa powder

For the cheesecake

• 325g cream cheese
• 70g caster sugar
• 50g soured cream
• 2 eggs
• 50g grated chocolate (this will give the cheesecakes a speckled appearance)/chocolate chips.

For the popcorn topping

• 40 plain popcorn
• 40g melted butter/margarine
• 2tbsp golden syrup
• 1tbsp dark brown sugar

Method

1. Preheat the oven to 170°c fan.
2. Place the digestive biscuits into a ziplock plastic bag and crush them with a rolling pin. We also used the rolling pin to roll over the bag of biscuits to ensure that they were all reached. You could also use a food processor, but with kids where’s the fun in that?!
3. Put the crushed biscuits into a bowl and add the melted butter and the cocoa powder and mix thoroughly.
4. Put 12 silicone cupcake cases into a muffin tin and evenly distribute the crushed biscuits between them and then gently press down with the back of a spoon.
5. Mix the cream cheese and the sugar together and then add the soured cream and eggs and beat until combined. Add the grated chocolate/chocolate chips and mix again.
6. Divide the mixture between the 12 cupcake cases. This may make a mess, it always does in our house and I really have to fight the urge to step in and take over and correct when they are doing their best.
7. Put the cheesecakes in the oven for 10 minutes.
8. Meanwhile melt the butter, golden syrup and brown sugar in a saucepan over a low heat. When they have melted add the popcorn and stir until the popcorn is fully coated in the mixture.
9. Remove the cheesecakes from the oven and put some popcorn on each one and return to the oven for another 10-15 minutes until they are set and springy to the touch.
10. Remove the cheesecakes from the oven and cool in the tin. Then place in the fridge before removing from the silicone cupcake cases. I have found it is easier to remove them without casualties once they have been in the fridge for a little bit.