Easter Baking and Fun

I've shown you quite a few glimpses of some of the outdoor fun we've been having this Easter holiday. The weather has been amazingly kind to us, and our weather is unpredictable enough that I always want to make the most of the good days. But we've been squeezing lots of indoor fun in too that I thought I might share today.

Before I get on to that though I just wanted to put a quick apology out there. With all this fun going on, in and out, I've been keeping up with the blogging reasonably, squeezing a fair amount of making in still, definitely following all my favourite blogs still and visiting gorgeous new blogs through comments left here, but the one thing that has definitely been hugely neglected (other than housework of course, but that goes without saying!) is replying to the lovely comments that you've left here. So I'm very sorry, I've loved reading them all as usual over the last couple of weeks but I haven't got round to replying properly. I'm hoping I'll catch up next week but you'll probably have forgotten all about the comment by then!

So back to the fun now. Lots of baking has been going on. Everyone has been involved in making hot cross buns aplenty:

I love having them with the 'crosses', but I don't much like the hassle of making the crosses, especially if it involves piping them on. It just seems too much effort for the end result - those crosses only look good after all, if they tasted good that would be another matter! So we experimented with some of this batch, and rolled out a thin slice of marzipan and cut stripes out of it to make the crosses. If you like marzipan, which we do, then it worked perfectly - very quick and easy to do and yummy to eat! (But don't cook them too hot I'd say.)

 Theo had a go at these chocolate monuts. He buried a frozen mini creme egg in each one before cooking too.

We were a bit disappointed that the creme egg didn't keep its egg like appearance more, despite being frozen hard before cooking it just melted into the middle really. These were too sweet and sickly for me, I'm not a creme egg fan, but the boys are and they seemed to enjoy them.

Next up, a chocolate cake with this Malteser Icing and decorated with lots ...

...and lots of maltesers!

This one was pretty high up the sweet and sickly stakes too, but was a big favourite and disappeared very fast!

And today Venetia and I have been creating crystallised primroses (and just a few violets too)

I saw them being made from this recipe last year and we really fancied giving them a go but didn't get round to it. These ones are drying out for a day now until we use them to decorate a special Easter cake at the weekend. We haven't decided what the special cake will be yet but I'm confident it will look amazing with these!

Non baking activities have included lots of playing cards, reading, a little bit of sewing and lots and lots of drawing. There's always lots of drawing going on here, but it's been egged on even more than usual by this challenge:

I came across this idea on a lovely blog I like to follow - 'Family, Faith, Food, Fabric', take a look here. We've been picking and choosing a bit, mainly because our 'sketchbooks' aren't the kind which allow you to tear out pages. They're proper, small, bound books, so anything with sticking or wetness generally isn't the best thing for the book as a whole. And I do like the idea of working in a book rather than on individual pieces of paper, there's plenty of that going on all the time as it is.  I really should have taken photos here, but we were all too intent on the drawing to remember about that. It's been fun, and interesting to see different interpretations of the prompts.

Last up - there's been lots of plastic canvas stitching going on. This is because I'm busy making something for the Plastic Canvas Blog Hop that's going on right now over at Crafty Pod. There have been gorgeous, creative makes every day this week that you can find over there. My turn is coming up on Monday, so I can't show you how it's going yet. Here's Maria's contribution though:



I'm so impressed with how her plastic canvas efforts have progressed since the Autumn when she last had a go. She really enjoyed it then but was incredibly random with it and enjoyed pulling her threads out and restarting far more than she did trying to finish.  It's strange how funny, little things suddenly open your eyes and make you see how your babies are growing up and changing before your eyes.

That's it for tonight. I'll be back tomorrow with a photo,

Sally.