We built a house, a rice crispy house

Now that I  notice cake and baking-related things a little bit more than I used to (small understatement there, you understand) I couldn't help but notice all the mentions of gingerbread houses at this time of year.  I felt it was possibly a bit beyond me, what with the working and kids and their activities and so forth, so picked up a box kit for a rice crispy house at a local supermarket.  We waited for a suitable afternoon and all got down to the important business of house-building...

 The kit gave you all the ingredients in the right quantities, so we just followed the instructions.

They didn't mention what a mess the marshmallow made of your pots though - this looks like it's gonna take some serious elbow grease to wash!

After pressing the prepared mix into the mould, and putting it in the fridge for the required time, we had our house components.  A little bit of icing was used as the mortar, and the house was ready to be decorated! Both girls were given a side each, some extra mini Smarties and relevant sized sweets and got to it.

The line sprinkles were meant to look like sparkly snow, but kinda got stuck along the way, and all over the work area.

This was mine and Mini-1's side, fairly neat and straight.  We tried to co-ordinate our colours so they made lines along the roof panel.  It sorta worked, right?

And here is Mini-2's side.  She used some of the other sweets and went for a different pattern with her mini Smarties.  

And here's a lovely line-up of all the treats we had available to eat on Christmas day itself, made by our fair hands...

Caramac choc cake, for a boy turning 8

I had seen a local bakery offering Caramac cupcakes, and bought some of the 'chocolate' bars when I saw them, in preparation for trying it myself at some point.  I didn't know if they used the chocolate in both the sponge and the icing, and thought I wouldn't ask - as they probably wouldn't tell me.

We have some good friends, K & M, whom we don't see often enough, and had arranged to catch up the day after their son J's 8th birthday.  After pinning K down to some of his likes and dislikes, I decided upon a small chocolate cake with Caramac buttercream icing and a number 8 picked out in boy-ish colour Mini Smarties.
But the icing was proving a bit tricky.  I melted 4 bars, as I really wanted to taste the flavour in the icing.  I let the mix cool a little, then poured it into slightly less than usual amount of sifted icing sugar.  I had thought that the melted mix would substitute for a bit of the butter, so added less of that too.  And was not impressed with the result.  It was almost grainy.  So I added more butter and a touch of milk...

And got this, still not right.  After a bit more playing around with ingredients it was workable but I would need to try again and note down exactly how much of everything I used in order to repeat it.  Still, it was smooth to the taste and spreadable (though wouldn't have been easy to pipe) and thus the cake was completed.

For future reference, I would level the cake - even such a small one.  I didn't think it would end up looking so rounded, it didn't appear that bad when 'naked'.  Still, the birthday boy loved it (it was a surprise) the kids gobbled it up, adults too!  Hooray.