Tilgate Park, Crawley

We seem to have been very busy lately, out and about all sorts of places. On Bank Holiday Monday the weather was beautiful, warm and sunny, much nicer that I can ever remember on the August Bank Holiday, and so we took a trip up to Tilgate Park in Crawley. Tilgate Park is somewhere that I remember visiting when I was little and I have fond memories, so it was lovely to go back.

We parked in the large car park at the top of the hill. The car park currently (2016) costs £1 per hour or you can park all day for £5. You can park at the bottom of the hill for free and then walk up the hill, it's not too far but difficult with little ones. The park itself is free to enter.

Harry was lucky enough to receive a digital camera this week so that we can join in a bloggers photo competition, and this was the first time that he has taken it out and about. He is absolutely thrilled with it and was snapping away, taking pictures of things which to us appeared mundane but all of which had caught his interest in some way.

There is a Nature Centre at the park, for which there is now a small entry charge (in 2016 £2.50 for adults, £1.50 for children). This is more than worth it, as there are plenty of animals to see and the children loved it. There are lots of farm animals, and various displays with plenty of information.

After seeing the animals we ventured into the rest of the park, which is huge, with plenty to explore. We walked down the hill to the lake to feed the ducks, but they didn't seem very hungry. It was very busy, so I guess they had been fed enough already! Then we let Harry and Mia loose in the adventure playground. Mia was quite little for most of the equipment but that didn't stop her from climbing about as much as she could, she has no fear sometimes. Harry is a little more timid, and Ram had to go climbing through a huge netting tunnel to rescue him at one point!

We spent the rest of the day at Grandma and Grandad's house just down the road, before coming home for a barbecue in the garden. I can't help feeling that this day marked the end of summer, the weather was almost too good to be true. We still have a couple more days out planned over the next week, but the final countdown to the start of school has definitely begun.

Homemade Zopf Bread for the GBBO Week 2

It is week two of the Great Bloggers Bake Off, and this week the theme is bread. Since I received my fantastic Kenwood Chef for Christmas I've been challenging myself to work through some of the bread recipes in the recipe book that it came with, and so I've already tried basic loaves and rolls. For this week's challenge I decided to make Zopf bread, which I've not made before.

I used the Zopf recipe from my Kenwood Chef recipe book which you can find online here - Kenwood Chef Recipes. The recipe uses egg, which gives it an almost cakey taste. Using the mixer is a bit of a cheat, but it certainly makes me more inclined to bake my own bread! The most difficult part was dividing the mixture into three and plaiting, it was difficult to roll it out into even ropes.

Here it is fresh from the oven:

 I'm so glad that I set the oven timer for 20 minutes rather than the recommended 30, as it was definitely cooked by then.

I was very pleased with my attempt, it was delicious and it looked good too. Definitely a recipe that I'll be trying again!

Next week is going to be a real challenge for me - Trifle, Floating Islands or Petit Fours. I've not made any of them before, so I need to do some research and planning!

I'm linking up to the Great Bloggers Bake Off, hosted by Mummy Mishaps and The Crazy Kitchen.

Under the Sea Day

We're getting near the end of our summer themed days now. They will definitely be resurrected during the holidays, but when Harry starts school we sadly won't have the time during the week. They have been a lot of fun, and it's been really good to have a list of activities planned for the day, although it does mean that Harry is now constantly asking what the next activity is going to be and isn't happy when I tell him it's time for him to amuse himself!

Under the Sea was a very versatile topic, covering not only marine life but also venturing into the realms of mermaids and pirates. I decorated the table with blue towels, my felt fish and various sea life related toys and jigsaws.

Our first activity was making a themed Under the Sea Cake. I've blogged about this one already - our Under the Sea sponge cake. We had lots of fun making this.

Then I kept the mixer out and we made some salt dough to turn into Pirate or Mermaid Treasure. My simple salt dough recipe is 1 cup salt, 2 cups flour and 1 cup water then baked in the oven until firm. We just cut out small circles, then Harry used some coins to press into them to make patterns and indentations. We first painted them with poster paint, unfortunately we didn't have a lot of yellow left so we mixed in brown and orange. Then when they were dry we finished them off with a coat of golden glitter paint. I've not seen them since we made them, they've been spirited off and hidden somewhere. You can read more detailed instructions here to see how we made them.

We are really into Hama beads at the moment, so I made up some simple Hama Bead Fish templates for Harry to copy, plus a more complicated angel fish for myself. I've included the patterns below, they are all made on a small hexagonal base.



Created using http://kandipatterns.com/assets/designer_test/

I've seen paper plate aquariums all over Pinterest and so I don't know exactly where to credit the idea, but I thought that a Hama Bead Paper Plate Aquarium would be a great home for our Hama bead fish. You just need two paper plates, cut a hole in one, paint them and then staple them back to back with the fish hanging from cotton inside. Harry also cut out some weeds from green paper to stick at the back. I was really pleased with this craft, although the fish wouldn't play along for a nice photograph!

Then we made some Mermaid Gardens. I gave each child a large plant pot tray to fill with sand, then gave them some clear glass pebbles, star sequins and little shells, as well as encouraging them to look around the garden for things to decorate the garden with. Mia had fun hiding the pebbles in the sand, but Harry was really involved in putting together his garden. Then he developed it into some small world play, coming up with a really detailed story about a plant that the mermaids were trying to grow, but it died in winter and they had to plant more seeds (sequins). It was fascinating to see where his imagination took him. You can see pictures of our mermaid gardens over on the Twinkl blog.

Finally I turned to Twinkl for some quieter activities for Harry. He's really into cutting out at the moment so he enjoyed these fish size ordering worksheets (Twinkl subscriber resource) and these fish colouring pages (free download). I'm also a fan of these pencil control worksheets (Twinkl subscriber resource) and complete the pattern worksheets (Twinkl subscriber resource).
Another successful themed day!

If you feel inspired, here you can find the posts about our other themed days:

Space Day
Antarctic Day
Dinosaur Day
Transport Day
Australia Day
Roman Day
Disney Frozen Day Beach Day

And some tips on how to hold a themed day at home for children.

Snowball cake pops

I'm not sure when cake pops started to become popular, although like many crafty trends I first discovered them on Pinterest. They are basically little balls of cake and icing stuck onto sticks and then decorated in all sorts of creative ways, usually dipped into melted chocolate and adorned with various edible embellishments. You can find some fabulous examples over on Bakerella.

I added "Make cake pops" to my Day Zero Project list along with lots of other new baking ideas that I wanted to try, and when we held our Antarctic themed day the other week I had the perfect opportunity to try out some snowball cake pops. They weren't the most successful baked items I have ever made, but it was a good start!

I kept it very simple for my first attempt. I found a great video which explained how to make cake pops very well, so I will share it with you below in case you want to have a go.

I used my usual Victoria Sandwich recipe, passed down from my Mum hence the imperial measurements - 6oz margarine, 6oz sugar, 3 eggs and 6oz self-raising flour - and made the two sandwich cakes. Then I put them into my Kenwood mixer and bashed them up until they were in crumbs. Then I made up the same amount of butter icing that I would usually make to fill and cover the sponge cake - 75g butter and 175g icing sugar - and mixed it all up together.

I used the resulting mixture to make lots of balls. This is where I went slightly wrong, and I made the cake balls far too big. My sticks (available from Hobbycraft or most large supermarkets) were very long and so I felt as though the balls needed to be large to balance them, but because they were so heavy they slipped off. I put all the cake balls into the fridge to cool for a little while before dipping them in chocolate.

I melted the white chocolate in a mug so that it would be nice and deep for dipping. Then I dipped the cake pops in the chocolate and put them in the fridge to set. Another mistake of mine was that I hadn't set up a proper area for them once dipped. Lots of instructions suggest a piece of polystyrene covered in cling film, and having this ready would have been a very good idea.

I found the whole process a bit fiddly, and so I only actually made a few proper cake pops, the rest were just left as cake balls on a plate with the melted chocolate spooned over! Then I sprinkled some desiccated coconut over them to make them look snowy.

Here are my finished efforts:

Not bad, but could do better. It's not something that I'm going to rush to make again - to be completely honest I prefer the taste of a cake made the normal way - but I'm glad that I tried!

Under the Sea Victoria Sponge

I'm afraid that I have a confession to make. I haven't yet watched an episode of the Great British Bake Off. But I do like baking, and I do like a challenge, which is why this new linky caught my eye. Jenny from Mummy Mishaps and Helen from The Crazy Kitchen have set a baking challenge to bloggers. The theme for each week is set by that week's Great British Bake Off episode, and this week it's Victoria Sponge and Angel Food Cake. To take part, we have to bake and blog a recipe inspired by the show.

I'm pretty good at a basic sponge cake, if I do say so myself, and I use it as the basis of lots of different cakes. This week our summer theme day was Under The Sea, and so the children and I made an Under The Sea cake. The Victoria Sponge itself wasn't much of a challenge, but to make it a bit different I bought some ready made fondant icing, which I've never used before, and we used it to make some fish themed decorations for the cake.

My Victoria Sponge recipe has been passed down from my Mum and it's very simple - 6oz margarine (I use Stork), 6oz caster sugar, 3 eggs and 6oz self-raising flour. To make enough butter icing to cover the top, middle and sides of the cake you need 75g butter, 175g icing sugar, food colouring and a small amount of milk. For this icing I also mixed in some glittery blue sprinkle things.

The decorations are made from the ready to roll icing, mixed with food colouring and cut out and decorated in the manner of playdough. I'm rather pleased with the result, it's not a traditionally pretty Victoria Sponge but it's fun, and I love the fact that the children helped to make it. It tasted great too!

Creating Hama bead Rangoli patterns for Diwali

Last year I started doing some Diwali crafts with the children as an introduction to the festival, and I'll be continuing that this year. Last year we made some Rangoli using dyed rice, which were very successful, and this year we tried out some Hama Bead Rangoli for Diwali.

Rangoli are decorative floor patterns which are created during Hindu festivals such as Diwali. They can be geometric, or shaped to represent flowers and petals, and are traditionally created using coloured rice, sand or petals. They are created to welcome the goddess Lakshmi into the home.

These Hama bead designs are small, and would be perfect to use as decorations during your Diwali celebration. You could hang them up, use them to create colourful bunting, or use them as coasters underneath drinks and bowls of food.

If you want to create these for yourself I have reproduced the patterns below. They are all made on the small Hama bead circle base (222) using red, yellow, orange and purple Hama beads. I kept to the same palette of colours for all four, but they would look lovely in any bright colours. I found that the patterns were simple enough for my son to copy with a little bit of help, and we had fun making them together.

If you are looking for ideas for Diwali crafts to do with your children you might also like my other Diwali craft posts:

Large Hama bead Rangoli
Diwali salt dough divas
Diwali dyed rice Rangoli
Simple Diwali cards
Simple Burfi sweets for Diwali

If you are teaching your young children about Diwali, here are some books that they might enjoy:

The Best Diwali Ever (affiliate link) - A heart warming picture book about Diwali, siblings and how very special this celebration can be.

Diwali colouring book for kids (affiliate link) - A simple coloring book for young children, suitable for ages 2-5. Contains all sorts of things to colour including lamps, fireworks, candles, lanterns, food & rangoli patterns.

First Festivals: Diwali (affiliate link) - Featuring simple text, gorgeous illustrations and satisfying lift-the-flaps, this book explores common Diwali traditions and helps young children understand the importance of this special holiday.

Mr Men and Little Miss Happy Diwali (affiliate link) - The five-day festival of lights is celebrated by millions of people across the world and the Mr Men and Little Miss can't wait to join in. They're busy cleaning their homes, creating Rangolis, lighting lamps and enjoying all the festivities, including large feasts that Mr Greedy is particularly looking forward to. It’s going to be a busy five days of light and laughter!

I've also collected together lots of fun Diwali crafts and activities on my Diwali Pinterest board:

Follow Jennifer Jain's board Diwali Crafts and Activities on Pinterest.

Review - Walkers Mighty Lights

We've been eating Walkers crisps in this household for years, in fact my husband is so devoted to the brand that they are usually the only crisps to be found in the cupboard. We do try to look for healthier options when it comes to snacks, so I was keen to try out the new Walkers Mighty Lights, 'Tasty ridged crisps with 30% less fat'.

Walkers Mighty Lights are available in three flavours and we were sent a multi-pack of each to try - Lightly Salted, Roast Chicken and Cheese & Onion. Although my veggie husband avoids meat flavoured products, all three flavours are suitable for vegetarians. The crisps are made from real potatoes with no artificial colours or preservatives, and they are a source of fibre.

My husband and I do eat quite a lot of crisps. I will often have a pack with my lunch, and although I don't give the children a packet to themselves they will sometimes share mine with me. But even though I don't tend to offer the children crisps as snacks during the day at home, we do go on a lot of long day trips, and we always need to have plenty of snacks on hand to keep them going. Crisps are ideal because the children can eat them themselves.

We were pleasantly surprised by the taste of the Walkers Mighty Lights. We've had lower fat crisps before, but I think what makes these crisps stand out is the ridged texture, which really holds the flavour. All three flavours were very tasty, and we all enjoyed them. We also found that there were plenty in the packet which was nice, as crisp packets seem to contain fewer and fewer crisps lately!

The children also really liked the crisps. Although they don't have the appetite for a full pack, they eagerly joined in while we were eating them. I'm not sure if I'd include a pack in Harry's lunchbox only for the reason that his appetite is tiny and he probably wouldn't eat a whole pack. Mia on the other hand probably could eat a whole packet, she was certainly asking for more and more!

I'm used to eating Cheese & Onion crisps so it was nice to have a selection to choose from. I don't eat a lot of meat so I'd probably avoid the Roast Chicken, but the Lightly Salted were also very tasty.

One thing that I did find when eating the crisps was that they tasted quite salty, and I do think it's important to remember that you do need to keep an eye on the amount of salt that young children are eating, especially if they are having lots of salty snacks in a day. So although Walkers Mighty Lights are in some ways a healthier option because they contain less fat, it's important to remember that they are not a healthy snack for children, just healthier than some other brands. Having said that, I'd still be happy for my children to snack on them from time to time, as long as they are balanced with plenty of other healthy snacks like fruit.

This is a paid review.