Double chocolate chip brownies, just because she wanted to

Now that school is in full-swing, and my hours at work have moved forward so that I start earlier, we are finding weekday mornings kinda tough.  We all still wake at the same time as before, but now there's no leeway or spare time whatsoever, and we've had to learn to love the clock, not.  If you aren't at the kitchen table and done with breakfast by 7.25am you miss out.  Seriously.  I've had to get creative with what can nourish the kids on the hop...

And the afternoons aren't much better - between homework, chill time, swimming lessons, Brownies, Girl Guides, dancing class and gymnastics, there's little leeway there either.  And we want to add ski lessons in to the mix, crazy!
So when one of the kids expressed a desire to bake brownies, well, we had to look at the schedule!  I felt bad about that, that we couldn't be a bit spontaneous, but I suppose that teaching them about commitments and responsibility will always be valuable.  So when today dawned wet, and resolutely stayed that way all day - we knew it was time to indulge.

As with any good teaching opportunity, we got out the recipe and all our ingredients.  Then started to prepare everything, so we would be ready to just toss them into the mixture at the appropriate time. White chocolate was chopped, eggs were cracked and mixed with vanilla extract, flour was sifted and so on.

As she is young and less experienced than myself, a lot of the white chocolate chunks melted when added to the brownie batter, so we quickly chopped some milk chocolate and sprinkled it over the top.  Time was of the essence, so the next photo is of the tray in the oven (hence the darkness - also it's quite rich and chocolatey).

It was quite wobbly when the timer went off, so I left it another couple of minutes before I removed it to cool.  We had started making it just before afternoon tea-time, so The Team were itching to try it! I cut it up straight away, and we all sampled it warm.  We were impressed, but also confused because it seemed more cake-like than our fudgy brownie usually is.  

But after we'd had our warm fill, it got more brownie-like as it cooled, and by the time the photos were taken, it was perfect!  Yummy, and the perfect rainy day activity treat.

Honey Joys, or maybe cornflake crispy cakes

When I was a young girl, in a land far, far away, Kellogs Cornflakes had recipes on the side of the box.  As did Rice Bubbles and other breakfast cereals I'm sure, but I specifically remember those two. As I do now, my Mum used to bake with us as young kids, and the recipes on the side of these boxes were some of our favourites.  The Rice Bubbles (or Rice Crispies, as they're known here) one requires an ingredient that seems to only exist in that other land, but the Cornflakes one is easy to do anywhere in the world.  In fact, the actual recipe I use is cut from a box, about 20 years ago perhaps!

Suffice it to say, Mini-1 had a friend over to play and Mini-2 didn't fancy whatever game it was they were playing, so asked to bake instead - as you do.  We had made Honey Joys a month or so ago, so still had lots of cornflakes leftover.

A little aside.  I just Googled honey joys and was astounded to get links!! Those two links are different, but for the exact same recipe.  That is just so cool!  I had no idea it would be out there - isn't the web great?

So, as you can see from the recipes, they are super quick and easy to make.  The UK conversions are 90g of granulated white sugar and 150g of cornflakes.  And that's it.  It's seriously that quick and simple.

I find that you need to let them cool in the baking trays for a while, so that they harden in the correct shape.  And they do last in a baking tin for storage, but never for long chez Becca - they're far too more-ish for them to stick around long!  Even Mr Becca has been known to eat a few in a row.

These ones have pretty sprinkles added to them - it doesn't affect the taste at all, but the children thought it looked nicer.  If you make some, do come back and let us know how you got on!

Mini-2 and the Peppa Pig sandwich cookies

Every now and then, Mini-2 gets the notion to use a box mix of something from the baking aisle of the supermarket.  We've been caught out by these before, because they look nice on the packet, but the taste is never as good as we can make ourselves.  So while we have fun making and baking them, we are not usually impressed by the taste.  This time, I figured I would just go with the flow, because they were Peppa Pig and I can't get her those little edible images any other way.

We followed the recipe on the back of the pack to make the dough, and she enjoyed rolling it out.

Well, mostly she enjoyed it - sometimes the dough got stuck to the rolling pin and it all got a bit messy.

Next it was time to use a fluted scone cutter and cut our the round, and a small diameter circular cutter (neither were provided in the box)  to cut away the interiors.  So it was kind of like making Empire or Linzer biscuits.

Once the dough was baked and had cooled, you made up the chocolate spread for the interior and sandwiched a full and a cut-out cookie together.  Then it was time to pop the little Peppa Pig images out of the icing sheet and onto each cookie.  

And the final result was these super cute Peppa Pig chocolate shortbread cookies.  They look good, but sadly tasted as expected.  But we had fun, and the whole family joined in eating the end product.

This post is our own opinion and we purchased the cookie box mix ourselves, no sponsoring or free product was provided.

Last lesson before Christmas

My remit - as the school baking lady/parent volunteer baker - is to choose easy, fun, fast recipes, so that the kids don't lose interest part-way through and so that we have enough time to complete all the tasks in the allocated lesson time.  I had thought that this lesson's recipe (for simple, roll-out sugar cookies) fit that bill, but as John Steinbeck so aptly wrote many years ago, 'the best laid plans of mice and men aft gang awry'  (it's a good few years since I studied this book in high-school English Lit class, so if that quote isn't verbatim, then let's call it a paraphrase).

Here we can see the instruction board that the teacher made - not too many ingredients (top left), tasks (right hand side) or length of recipe (lower left) - right?

This recipe required a hand-mixer, so the teacher kindly brought in her vintage Kenwood number - some of the children had never seen nor used one, so it caused much merriment.

Everyone wanted a turn!

You won't be surprised to learn that the resultant dough was rather sticky, probably from being overworked.  So we just spread out more flour before rolling out the dough and stamping out the fluted circle shapes (I'm telling you the actual shape of cookie, because when you look further down you may not recognise those shapes as circles, bless them (we didn't have a spatula with which to lift up the cookies onto the tray))

Here we see a couple of the children rolling out the last possible bits of dough in order to stamp out just one more cookie!!

And the final tally - 3 trays of roll-out sugar cookies, counted just as the bell was ringing for the end of the period.  The school is gearing up for the St Andrews Day (November 30th) performance and then the Christmas Show so we won't have time for any more lessons this year.  Here's hoping they want me back next term/next year.  Happy Holidays kids!

Teacher Becca

Back to school for our baking group again this morning.  It was a bit less well organised than our first lesson, as I realised on Sunday evening that I hadn't confirmed the recipe we would be making this morning.  I looked through the book I had in mind, to find the Cheese Straws recipe and photocopied it and took it in to the school office for the teacher, Mrs F.  But I was busy yesterday, and hadn't had a chance to call her and see if that recipe was ok.

So I turned up at the school this morning and apologised but luckily the recipe was perfect, and she'd found time to do her images for the lesson.  Phew.

The children came into class, saw the board with all its information and their names against the particular task (removed for the photo) and got straight to work.  Mrs F was dealing with another student just outside the classroom and was proud of their good listening and remembering skills when she saw what they had done.

 The table all set out, some ingredients already weighed out...

 Mixing up the flour, butter and grated cheese with spoon.  Which didn't really work, so time to get messy!

Eww!

These were meant to be straws of cheese, but after being rolled out and cut by a group of excited children, they are just long fingers of cheese mix, ready for the oven.  Hope they taste good!!

Before I left, we agreed on the recipe for the next class and have agreed to exchange email addresses and try to agree the following classes recipe at the current class - that should put less pressure on us teachers  ;)