The calm before the storm. And some Christmassy baking.

I’ve been terribly quiet of late I know.  Mr T is nearly 5.5 months, and I’ve been busy cramming reading of my Baby Led Weaning book in during feeds, stockpiling j-cloths and taking a deep breath for what’s ahead.

It’s also been a time to reflect on how the journey has gone with Dominic.  He turns 3 in 2 weeks – a bonafide pre-schooler.  He’ll always be my baby boy, he’s just my big baby boy now.  Last night, for dinner he ate brown rice, with red lentil dahl (recipe from the back of the East End lentils packet), wilted spinach and green beans.  I gave myself a high five for that one.  Then I remembered last saturday where he ate a plain bread roll for lunch, and a plain bread roll and some scraps of cheese for dinner.  You can’t fret – it’s all about checks and balances and in the end.

Ta-da!

In the meantime I’m going to share this weeks baking project.   There is no one alive who wouldn’t like this. It may kill a diabetic, but they would still go down smiling.  It also makes brilliant Christmas gift.  You’ll need 2 sessions to make this – one evening make the cake and refrigerate, then the next day do the icing.

Dominic moved from the toddler room to playschool in his creche this year.  Some of the staff jobshare.  So I worked out that including his 2 main current teachers, he’s been looked after by all 8 of the staff at some point or another just this year.  It’s a lovely cosy place, Dom’s creche, and I see the warmth with which they treat the kids.  Unfortunately I’m on unpaid leave right now and cannot afford nice bottles of wine x 8.  Nor do I know if they even drink wine.  And they can only go home with so many Yankee candles.   So I turned to my virtual mum friends.  I’m part of an online group of amazing, helpful and inspiring women, and it was from one of them that I got this idea. Chocolate biscuit cake christmas puddings.  One large one for them all to share during break time, and one small one each to bring home.

The prep

I visited a total of 7 shops to get everything for these, but now I’m armed with fancy twine, a roll of cellophane and assorted pudding bowl shapes so there’s no stopping me!  (Actually my friend Fiona got me the cellophane, well done her!)  I drooled my way through Decobake but managed to leave with just my coloured icing, and the silver cake boards.  I could easily spend a lottery win amount there.

Got them out

The recipe came from Dee at Tremendous Fun, a wonderful crafty blog run by one of the aforementioned mammy-gang.  I tripled the quantities which made 1 x 3 pint pudding bowl (not quite filled up) and 8 mini yogurt pot puddings.  Dom! Eat another yogurt! was my mantra the last few days… My added extra ingredients were raisins and malteasers.  I didn’t have one little bit even left for me or Mark to eat.  The fact that the girls in the creche had it sliced and tasted before I left the building this morning, and then were texting me about it as I drove home means I think it was a hit.  Really need to make one for us now!

- Jill

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