Poc Poc cakes

Make the banana muffin recipe a la Dora the Explorer. Kid yourself you know it off by heart, and forget to put in the oil. Pour mixture into cases using either the spout of your mixing bowl or a jug.

Voila.

Lemon and carrot muffins

This recipe is largely adapted from the Dora The Explorer magazine's banana muffin recipe. The carrot on top is at The Girl's request, as apparently carrot cake cannot be carrot cake unless it has white icing and a carrot on top, as that is what carrot cake is like in Peppa Pig. All hail Peppa Pig, culinary reference point for preschoolers. This particular decorative carrot is made out of carrot, funnily enough, and bits of cucumber skin for leafy bits. Random, but best I could do at a moment's notice.

I do feel a bit like "Great Aunt Loretta" from "Grandpa in My Pocket" with some of these random additions to my cookery, but needs must... I'm not so desperate yet to try anything so nuts bold as a curry trifle however. And I have to say, I really dislike Grandpa in my Pocket, possibly more so than anything else on TV at the moment.

This distresses me, as I am otherwise a fan of James Bolam, but as the Grandpa of the title he seems to be some sort of geriatric vigilante, a busybody interfering in rather a bullying fashion. A "kids of today, I know best" attitude seems to dominate his motivation. He harangues teenagers, his sister (who he seems to detest), random visitors who he deems to be behaving unacceptably... and rather than dealing with it in a way which models positive attributes, like, say, honesty and talking to people to resolve conflict, it's all devious and underhand. Oh, sorry, did I say devious and underhand? Obviously I meant clever and fair... The throwaway comment about "teamwork" at the end of each episode is a bit ingenuous, if you ask me, as Grandpa yet again makes his grandson an unwilling accomplice. ("Not the shrinking hat, Grandpa!" - you can say it every episode Jason, he'll still ignore you.) The whole thing is a bit mean for my taste.

But perhaps Grandpa has just become bitter and twisted as a natural reaction to the manic happiness of the rest of the Mason family. Do they put Prozac in the water in their hometown of Sunnysands? Watching that programme gives me the slightly sick feeling you get after mainlining a full bag of Haribo... but without the sugar rush.

If you, however, fancy indulging your own sugar craving, these muffins are rather yum. And as they have carrot in, you can kid yourself it's one of your five a day. It's got lemon in too, so if you count that, that's two of your five a day, right?

Lemon and carrot muffins

Take:

zest of 1 lemon
Juice of 1/2 lemon
Handful of raisins
100g carrots
200g self-raising flour
80g sugar
100ml milk
2 tablespoons oil
2 eggs
Philedelphia cheese (a dollop - 2 tablespoons?)
Icing sugar (enough to get the right texture for icing - 100g?)

Combine the lemon zest, lemon juice, raisins and grated carrot in a bowl.
Beat eggs and add to the mix.
Add oil.
Add flour and sugar and beat well.
Add milk - consistency of the mix should be moderately firm.
Put mix into muffin cases (makes 8).
Bake at 190 degrees for approximately 20 mins.

Combine about 2 tablespoons of Philedelphia cheese with around 100g of icing sugar. This will give you a tasty topping approved by my preschooler!

"Narabug" cakes

Waybuloo's back in the Bedtime Hour on Cbeebies. We mourn the passing of Charlie and Lola, but thankfully they're not messing with Abney and Teal or I swear we'd riot. Waybuloo is too long for the first half of the Bedtime Hour. Charlie and Lola was perfect, I could let ToddlerGirl watch that to the end before slapping on the mandatory Octonauts episode and we'd still be in the bath before 6.30. If she catches the start of Waybuloo though, we're stuffed.

The other side effect of Waybuloo now being on at 6pm is that my other half gets the opportunity to sample its wares. This meant that last night, marital conversation centred on whether or not the Narabugs were butterflies or not. I had always assumed that they were; caricatured of course, but still butterflies. I was scandalised therefore when a recent episode showed a Narabug laying an egg - and don't think insect-egg here, think hen-egg - in a nest, that then hatched into a fully-fledged Narabug. Did the Hungry Caterpillar pupate in vain?!

I relayed this tale of indignation and asked for the general consensus. ToddlerGirl insists that Narabugs are butterflies. My husband disagrees, and concludes that Narabugs are their own unique genus. I concede that the adults in this conversation are perhaps taking it too seriously. It's not like they are telling us something factually inaccurate, like snakes are slimy, but everytime I see a Narabug now, I think of that egg and it irks me.

But I'll tell you what doesn't irk me - cake.

Take:
A dozen or so fairycakes. Made or *coughcough* shop-bought.
3oz butter
6oz icing sugar for butter-icing
1oz icing sugar for water-icing
Food colouring
Cocoa (optional)
Chocolate chips

Using a sharp knife, cut out the centre of the cakes, taking care not to go too deep, but deep enough to get a good fix of butter icing wodged in there. Take the cut-out cake-section to one side and chop it in two to make 'wings'.
Mix butter and icing sugar, and colour as desired.
Use a teaspoon to dollop butter-icing into cake.
Wedge wings into butter icing.
Mix a few drops of water with icing sugar to a texture slightly runnier than paste. Colour icing as desired (here we added cocoa to make the brown colour).
Add body detail with water icing, using the edge of a teaspoon to apply.
Add two choc chips as eyes.
Let the icing set before eating (yeah right...)

Poc-Poc biscuits

I cannot wait for 5.50pm. It's love. The Adventures of Abney and Teal has cast its spell upon me, and I am smitten.

If Oliver Postgate (Clangers, Bagpuss etc) was still alive and making animation today, I'd like to think it would be something like Abney and Teal. They live on an island in the middle of a park in a city, exploring and having fun with their friends. There's no heavy-handed moralising, there's no conflict, it's just... lovely. It's that plus the soundtrack in particular, I think, that reminds me of Bagpuss, the way it is stripped down and simple, which in itself mirrors the idea of the characters all living in this oasis of calm, adrift from the rest of the world. It is innocent, joyful, and simply beautiful to watch.

It's from the same stable as Teletubbies and In the Night Garden, but has more of what we grown-ups would recognise as plot; perhaps due to its 10 minutes length as opposed to the half-hour or so that Teletubbies and ITNG have to hold tiny attentions. But there is something endearingly retro about it, and I find it so refreshing compared to the 'modern' animation styles of Numberjacks, Waybuloo, and the other wide-eyed, gawping, brashly coloured computer-generated characters that bombard us. Of course, I don't doubt for a minute that Abney and Teal isn't computer-generated, but it has the feel of an illustration brought to life.

It offers less for BabyBoy, but ToddlerGirl is also pretty smitten, and has taken to declaring "That was an adventure!", Teal-style, at various intervals. Picking tomatoes, is an adventure. And why not?

So we had a biscuit-making adventure. The Poc-Pocs appear to be made of wood, so to try and get the 'woodgrained' appearance, I marbled my biscuit dough with cocoa, although I did overwork the mix a bit, which is why it isn't as streaky as I would have liked. They taste nice, though!

Take:
2oz flour
1.5oz butter or marg
1.5oz sugar
A teaspoon of cocoa
Half a dozen raisins or so

Chuck the flour, butter and sugar into a bowl.
Give toddler a fork and stand back.
When toddler has finished 'mixing', give it a bigger mix until the mix turns into something resembling breadcrumbs. Keep mixing a bit more after that until it forms a dough. If it is being especially stubborn, add a couple of drops of milk.
Next, add cocoa, and mix just enough to streak the mixture.
Get toddler to help you roll out the mix to about a 4mm thickness.
Give toddler spoon to lick while you cut out Poc-Poc shapes with a sharp knife.
Cut raisins in half, and push into Poc-Pocs to make eyes.
Bake around 180 degrees Celsius, or Gas Mark 3, for about 10 minutes.

Mr Tumble Sandwich

You know how they say "if at first you don't succeed, try, try, try again"? And you know how they also say the definition of madness is "repeating the same actions and expecting different outcomes"? I'm not sure which camp feeding toddlers falls into.

Perhaps I should subtitle this "The continuing quest to get ToddlerGirl to eat tomatoes"? Not that I force them at her at every opportunity or anything, but I keep offering them with no pressure to eat, to see if she eventually decides that she likes them again. She'll thank me when she's old enough to know about lycopenes and stuff. Maybe.

So tomato ladybirds failed, and Mr Tumble sandwich... Well, it failed in the tomato stakes, though the rest was eaten happily. BabyBoy was more than happy to find a home for the unwanted fruit-masquerading-as-veg.

To recreate your own Tumble-tastic open sarnie, take:

1 slice bread
Some cheese spread
1 sliced olive
6 raisins
Some grated carrot
1 cherry tomato
1 normal tomato

Spread the bread with the cheese spread.
Add two olive slices as eyes.
Chop the cherry tomato in half, and use 1 half as the nose
Chop the normal tomato into four (half and half again), and use one wedge as a smiley mouth.
Add raisin freckles/spots on cheeks.

The likeness is uncanny, no?

No...?

Numberjacks: Number-flapjacks

My toddler has been insisting for ages that Numberjacks is called Numberflapjacks. She's had flapjack on a few occasions; obviously it's made an impression.

I would love to be able to say that I could whip up proper Numberjack-shaped flapjacks, but I don't think the properties of flapjack lend itself to sculpting. (There's a reason oat products didn't feature in my GCSE Art & Design course.)

But what is Numberjacks, I hear the uninitiated enquire? It's a bizarre series where animated number characters (with strangely stubby eyelashes) solve problems in the real world, such as foiling the evil Numbertaker from stealing all the legs from a chair, and various other objects. It's odd, but I like the vaguely educational slant it has to it. My daughter likes numbers at the moment, so she gets more out of it than, say, Alphablocks, at this stage.

But on to the flapjack! It will do the waistline no favours but gets hoovered up in no time. This makes a batch that fits our 25cm x 16cm tin.

Take:
150g butter
100g sugar
2 generous tablespoons of golden syrup
400g oats
1 large bar of chocolate (you'll probably only need half the bar for the flapjack, but we melted the whole bar and then the leftovers mysteriously vanished...)


Melt the butter, sugar and golden syrup over a gentle heat.
When melted, add the oats and stir well.
Press the mixture into a baking tin.
Bake at 180c for 25 minutes.
Now comes the tricky bit...
When the mixture is cooked, leave it to cool in the tin for a while.
Cut out number shapes from greaseproof paper to use as stencils.
Stick number shapes onto flapjack - I used a bit of golden syrup to stick them on, although I wonder whether sticking the numbers onto the mix before baking may have worked better.
Melt chocolate over a bowl of hot water.
Paint chocolate over flapjack, using the back of a teaspoon and being careful around the edges of the stencils.
Wait til chocolate has cooled so it is no longer runny but is not rock-solid, and carefully peel off stencils. (If you stick it in the fridge and let the chocolate set completely then it becomes tricky to get the stencils off. But if you peel it off before it has set enough, it will ooze.)

Ta-dah! Tasty number-flapjacks!

Mr Bloom's Nursery: Ladybird nibbles

We're not an especially green-fingered bunch. My daughter kills plants with kindness (over-watering) while I tend to kill them through neglect - with two kids and a cat, something's got to give! However Mr Bloom's Nursery rekindled my interest in gardening, and I like the idea of my kids knowing where their food comes from (and I don't mean Tesco).

The initial spark sputtered a bit after I realised just how quickly weeds grow back (who has time to weed every week?!) and that a bit of effort is required beyond chucking some water on when it's hot. My style of gardening boils down to sticking it in the ground and hoping for the best, and it delivers mixed results.

Our tomatoes, however, proved hardy sorts, and my daughter has enjoyed watering them with a special watering can from her grandparents. (The previous watering can was of less traditional construction, shall we say: an empty plastic milk bottle with some holes punched in the top end with a screwdriver. It did the job though.) After much waiting and watering, finally - finally! - we had some red tommies. Behold!



They were harvested with great enthusiasm, but when it comes to eating them, enthusiasm dips. I think perhaps Mr Bloom may have some responsibility in that area... I think the programme is great, teaching kids about how things grow and all that, but I wonder whether having animatronic vegetables - Sebastian the Singing Aubergine, Margaret the Cabbage, Joan the Fennel to name a few - is sending out mixed messages. Put it this way, when we are in the veggie section of Tescos, and my daughter points at the butternut squash, she doesn't shout out "Look, mummy, squash!", she shouts "Look, mummy, Raymonds!"

I had thought that having grown them she might have been more inclined to try them though. Baby Boy will chomp them down happily, but he's an undiscerning sort, bless him (and so was my toddler at that stage). Taking my cues from Mr Bloom and our garden friends, I tried dolling them up as ladybirds instead. I wish I could report that she then gobbled them up with gusto, but nay. But if you want to try similar, here's what I did:

Take:
2 tomatoes
4 raisins
Some balsamic vinegar

Using a sharp knife, cut the tomatoes in two.
Position tomatoes on plate with raisin placed at top, in the dent where the stem was.
Taking sharp knife again, dip it in balsamic vinegar, and draw a line down the tomato halves, and then dip again to add each spot. (This can be a bit fiddly).

Job's a good'un! I did try this with marmite instead of balsamic vinegar, which was frankly revolting, although more aesthetically pleasing. I also tried brown sauce, which was also less fiddly but possibly an acquired taste. Our tomatoes are quite intensely flavoured so with a blander (shop-bought) type, I'd give brown sauce another go.

Ladybirds are our friends, says Mr Bloom. I think my daughter has taken this too literally: every time we see a ladybird, she has to stop, greet it and give me a full report on what it's doing... Our walks have become epic. Thanks, Mr B...

Octonauts: Fish Biscuits

We all enjoy a bit of Octonauts. I love it as I (and the kids) get to learn about bizarre new marine life - Dwarf lantern sharks! Spookfish! Blobfish! - and it's all factually accurate (as far as I can tell, not being a marine biologist). My daughter loves it because of the adventures, and my son loves it because of the pretty colours and bold animation (I assume that's it, as for a while, when he was a newborn wracked with wind, Octonauts would be the only thing that could temporarily distract him).

The gist of the programme is Peso the penguin, Kwazi the cat-pirate and Captain Barnacles the polar bear have exciting adventures following their mission of "Explore! Rescue! Protect!" There's a supporting cast of Shellington the scientist (and otter), Professor Inkling the squid, Tweak the rabbit (the engineer and one of the two girl characters), and Dashi the dog (the other girl who just seems to take photos. I'm not sure what her role is, if she's a scientist, journalist or what, really.)

Their adventures are amusing, exciting, and all realised in a very cute style of animation I want to call "anime" but will probably be corrected... The merchandising doesn't seem to have caught up with this programme yet, there don't seem to be any associated products available in the UK yet, other than some storybooks. Which may be no bad thing.

I can't even find a proper recipe for 'fish biscuits', which are the staple food of the Octonauts, cooked by Tunip, a Vegemal (a cross between a vegetable and an animal, we assume, and of indeterminate gender). I'm not interested in the Lost 'fish-biscuits' which are fish-shaped but citrussy, I don't think those would satisfy a polar bear, let alone a cat-pirate.

So, I have created my own.

Fish biscuit recipe

5oz flour (I used self-raising but plain may work better)
2oz butter or margarine
1 egg
1/2 can tuna flakes in brine
Tabasco sauce
A little milk

Rub in butter and flour.
Beat egg and stir into mixture.
Drain tuna flakes well, press out as much moisture as possible, then stir tuna flakes into mixture.
Add extra flour if mixture is too sticky, until it becomes a dough-like texture.
Add a few splashes of Tabasco sauce and mix well.
Roll out onto a floured board.
Cut into fish shapes (or, for perfectionists, make a fish template out of greaseproof paper and use that to cut around).
Place on greased baking tray and brush with a little milk.
Cook Gas Mark 6-7, or around 220C (in our fan assisted electric oven) for about 8-10 minutes or until golden.


"Oh my god, you've actually made fish biscuits," uttered my husband, in tones bordering on horror. "Did you have to?" And then he ate one, admittedly under duress. The verdict? It was "Surprisingly okay, actually."

My daughter ate the whole of one before deciding she didn't want a second, and Baby Boy chomped through two (half of each ended up on the floor, but that's par for the course). So draw your own conclusions on taste. I personally think they'd have benefited from more bravery with the Tabasco sauce, but they were pleasant enough. (If you've ever had cobbler, then they reminded me of the pastry you get on top of that.)

Another thing I like about Octonauts is that when my daughter plays pretend-Octonauts, she has to be Kwazi but I have to be Captain Barnacles, which I am pleased to think recognises my place in the pecking order of the house. Daddy is Dashi, apparently. 'Nuff said.