Abby Attempts: The Great British Bake Off Technical Three

Dampfnudel! I've now found out the reason why I put these off... They're rubbish!! How on earth are you supposed to know when they're done?! They look like they're barely cooked so you obediently follow the timings, plus a couple of minutes extra, and the flippin things are encrusted to the bottom of the pan, gah. I'm pretty sure the dampfnudel itself was cooked, I tried to squish it to see if it was still a lump of dough, but it felt okay (I was surprised, the top looked like a lump of raw dough) so that was a small consolation, now I've got a line of barely edible nudlen (the plural of dampfnudel, perhaps?)

I picked some plums from our plum tree for the sauce and felt pretty pleased with myself, it was tasting delicious. Then I stick buzzed it and it went everywhere, now I've got little bits of plum all over my clothes and the kitchen, hmpff.

Forget the vanilla sauce, I'm sure they called it custard in the bread week episode, so I mixed up a birds instant sachet. Thanks Approved foods, 10p! At least that's one bit that tasted right.

I won't be bothering with them again. You might as well mix in a bit of sugar into a dumpling mix and plonk them on top of a casserole!

Abby Attempts: The Great British Bake Off Technical Four

I needed to do a bit of a switch around with the technicals due to missing ingredients, hence week four has happened before three! So today is lace pancakes, dampfnudel will have to wait.

Today I decided to get the boys in on the action, Zach and Jacob were both with me for these, so the lace and heart shaped brief was quickly tossed aside. As was my sanity as random objects appeared in the batter. A duplo dog was amusing, Zach lobbing in a grubby washing up sponge in not so much... Calmcalmcalm. Failfailfail.

The batter was really smooth... I followed Mary's instructions and mixed in the flour into the eggy milky well GRADUALLY and it looks like that's the key to not getting my usual lumps. You learn something new :)

Using the squeezy bottle (Home Bargains, 39p. Ace find!) was actually really easy, much better than my piping fails. Two out of three of us are nursing small burns,buy what does that matter when you're having fun making shapes like this?! After two fancy hearts it was trains, words, a house, a Mummy with a baby in her tummy (Zachy's request, no, there's no message in there!) and animals all the way.

Highly recommend, lots of fun :)

Find the recipe here http://www.bbc.co.uk/food/recipes/lace_pancakes_20045

Jacob in a basket

I adore this boy!!

Trying out Geocaching

Last weekend my friend Nikki posted on Facebook what a great time she spent with her family geocaching. It's like a treasure hunt where you use your phone as a gps and find a certain point, often interesting or beautiful. When you find it you sign the log book and put in a little something that you brought with you, swapping it for something you take out of the box.
I'd seen it as an activity option at Center Parcs when we were there at the beginning of January but we weren't sure if our boys are too young to manage the maps and gps.
Today we tried it. We downloaded the free app and had a look- there are LOADS! More than 2 million, in 185 different counties. And they are everywhere! We picked one to find a 10 minute drive from our house, and we passed a few other areas on our way.
We found a castle we had never seen and had a great time, despite a grumpy baby (probably his second time ever being grumpy in his whole life so I couldn't really complain) and freezing rain. When the gps said we were pretty close we had to have a real search to find the cache but we found it! Really quite exciting, and I bet it could become quite addictive. We did another one on our way home!
So we have found a new favourite :) Outdoorsy, educational, fun and FREE to do with family. You can't beat that!!

TRY IT WHERE YOU ARE!

Christmassy Jacob

Here's 14 week old Jacob on my knee this evening. He just smiles and laughs all day long. We love him so much!!!

December is BUSY, and I haven't even done anything Christmassy yet!

Hello!

It has been months and months and I think I'd better stop filling up Facebook with photos, so I'm going back to blogging (I think!)

The past week has been a whirlwind of family, friends, parties, food and LOADS of children!! Oliver turned four, we crammed 12 kids plus three of our own, into our house, we made a foiled-covered rocket (it survived at least four children and three balloons in there at once) Jacob was blessed by Ben at our church, I singlehandedly looked after six children for more than three days (three of my friend's, three of my own- oldest was 7...) And the inlaws, outlaws, a couple of brothers and my Nanna came up all for a flyingvisit for the blessing. It has been wonderful, and now I feel like I need to sleep for a week!