Biscuit Baking

Well today me and Alice have been baking biscuits and to find a recipe I dug out an old favorite, Bridget Jones - Kids Cookbook. I was given this as a child and loved it so much I still have it today!

Its a great book because the recipes rang from making a sandwich to proper dinners and really are all child friendly.

We were making 'Basic Busicuits' today and these are great because they really do only take about 15 minutes to make (yep eve with a toddler doing most of the 'making') and about 15 minutes in the oven so even the most impatient of toddlers wont have too long to devour their handiwork!

The recipe's really simply too :o)

Ingredients:

225g Plain Flour

1/2 teaspoon Baking Powder

100g Butter or Margarine (i even substitute this for the special 'baking spreads' the supermarkets make)

40g Icing sugar

2 Egg Yolks

1 teaspoon Vanilla Essence.

Preheat oven to Gas 4 and grease your baking trays,

Put flour and baking powder in a bowl and stir.

Cut the butter up into small pieces (I let Alice do this herself with a pair of plastic dough scissors)

Rub the butter into the flour until it resembles bread crumbs (Alice loves getting her hands messy and rubbing it all in too here)

Stir in the icing sugar

Make a well (although this never happens in ours!) and add the vanilla essence and the egg yolks.

Stir this in until the mixtures turns into clumps (Alice finds this part a little trickier but enjoys us each taking turns to try)

Mold it together into a ball with your hands

Flour a surface and roll out  the dough (together!!)  until it is about 5mm thick.

Then cut the dough into any shapes you like, if you dont have cutters then you could use a blunt knife to make letters/shapes or a plastic cup to make circles.

Re-roll the dough until its all been cut and used then pop your biscuits on the baking trays.

Place near the top of the oven for 15 minutes or until browned.

We then took them out to cool and decided what topping to have, we made a simple icing out of icing sugar and water and then I let Alice choose the colour and flavor, todays creations were yummy green straberry flavor  (we only did half the batch with icing though just to still feel healthy as its fun to add the topping but the kids love them either way!)

Other good ideas are to pop some choc chips in the dough, plain white icing with any type of sprinkles, glace cherries cut up etc endless possibility's.

These made for a really fun and yummy treat and the plain ones can stay in the tin for some midweek nibbling!

Yummy!

Picking the right TV Subscription

Well this morning we've all just been chilling our and relaxing a bit as its been a pretty busy week for the kids so quite nice just to spend a quite morning at home.
Alice and Thomas were loving watching 'How To Train your Dragon' for about the 4th time in a week and it reminded me that I wanted to post something about this.
When I talk to friends their often surprised that we do have the full sky package and I know a lot of people a lot better of than us who think the full subscription is excessive and wasteful. However when deciding this was the package that suited us we really did take a lot of things into account, and I know that we make a saving every month by paying Sky that little bit extra.
Our package includes our phone line rental, free evening and weekend land line calls, standard broadband and Sky TV including Sky Sports and Movies. This all comes in at around £60 a month so is admittedly one of our bigger bills.
Now I know most people dont justify the Sports and the Movies but we worked out that in our preSky days we would've gone to the cinema as a couple at least once a month, and would undoubted go more (and certainly not less) now that we have the children so this is a saving of at least £10 a month, our bigger movie spend however was between buying films and Blockbuster. We would often buy 2 or 3 cheap DVDs a months costing us about £15 and then while we didn't use blockbuster too often it certainly totaled around £40 a year so another £3 a month.
So on having the movies alone we save around £27 a month compared to the old days!

Then the sports, now I wont lie neither of us ever spend hundred on going to see live sport, but we both like the cricket and my other half is a football fan. While we didn't used to have to directly pay money to see sports beforehand if a match was (as it inevitably was) on Sky it did mean a trip to the local pub.
If this was to meet a few friends then you can obviously except a few pints these days to come in at about £6 and if we went as a family then it would be a lot more as you know what kids are like..they seem to want feeding and watering too!!
So again around a £24 a month saving minimum

So between the movies and the sports we save £51 a month, take this away from our sky subscription and you've got £9, now as far as I'm aware you cant even pay your BT Line rental for this.

So in conclusion, sometime you have to remember that the obvious ways to save arnt always actually the best!

I love Marks and Spencer

I love M&S its as simple as that!
In my ideal world I would live in their clothes and eat all their yummy sandwiches everyday!
Yesterday I popped in for a Bra fitting in the hope that I might need a different size but also just because my year old non wired (post baby) saggy bras were finally driving me mad!
I was bought down to earth by the reminder that my boobs were still unfortunately the same old 36 A's they have been since Alice wad born well Barr the couple of Dolly Parton DD weeks post baby one and two. Despite my years of patience as a teen that they would one day grow and then the promise of vabies equalling bigger boobs (for more than a week)all that seems to've got bigger is me not the boobs as I now crave my ore baby 32 A's!!
But back to the point I went to look around for something new in my ridiculous size when I encounter M&S's new super padded '2 sizes bigger' (Yes two sizes bigger!!) bra. was sceptical as wonder bras etc have always looked more like some sort of pointy sixties space woman outfit on me but couldn't belivr how great this bra was!
I blew my entire (modest) budget and spent £22 on this and it's fab looks brilliant on and in tempted to now never take it back off!!
I'm sure this can be justified as having saved me thousands on a boob job!
Bow I wonder if I could wear. 38 C over the top and have DD boobs!!!

Car Window Travel Hell

Well tomorrow we are driving the 150 odd miles from here down to Chichester to see my brother in law and his family.
For a long time these long journeys were fine as our precious bundles of joy would cry for 10 minutes and then quickly drift off into a content car sleep (that special sleep all children under the age of 18 months just cant resist!).
However last time we attempted this journey there was the normal period of crying, but not followed by the blissful sleep oh no there was a wants list and so more crying and some throwing and kicking us in the back and then finally the window was being wound down. This was annoying but not so bad in itself, Alice at least seemed entertained for half an hour or so. And then it happened...half way down the A34 a curious voice asking 'where the wellie gone is heard from the back' and yes yes she has actually done it the lovely gorgeous pair of boots I had bought her only 2 days before is now one lovely gorgeous boot on one little foot the other now somewhere several miles down the road between Oxford and Newbury. Cue massive telling of,f threats of naughty step upon arrival at the brother in laws, more telling off, crying and a final telling off.
The kids did get quieter, just that it was me spending the rest of the journey whinging after this!!

So today (with journey in mind again tomorrow) I have resorted to eHow and used their extremely clever 'dishcloth' technique to remove my daughters window crank.
I read the article simply stating to leave the window fully wound down (i left mine fully up as I have no idea how to pull a fully down window back up ad dont want to look up two car related fixes in one day!) then got my yellow duster (no dishcloth to be found) and squeezed it into the gap between crank handle and door. wiggled it around for a minute and ping I couldn't belive it, off came the entire crank handle!
So now having placed these 'spare' parts in a sandwich bag in the glove box, never to be required again untill we sell the car!! I shall bask in my window up glory!

Feed my Family for well quite a lot less than a fiver

Just saw sainsburys latest hook for you to buy a weeks meals for £50 and it reminded me of Jamies whole feed your family for a fiver deal.
Iv never understood this as we eat nice tasty healthy food and in sure it almost never even costs a fiver!
Take tonights dinner Chicken and Bacon pasta
Half packet of chicken mini fillet: £1.50 (whole pack is £3 when you buy on the tesco 4 for £12 meat offer)
1/4 pack of value cooking bacon: 17p
3/4 pack of Napolina pasta:75p
1 tin of Napolina tomatoes: 49p
2 red peppers: 60p (tesco mixed pepper pack)

£3.51 total

Just diced this all up and browner the meat and chucked the rest in 20 min simmer then over the cooked pasta.
We all loved this so tasty the kids had seconds and we've still got a whole portion left for lunches!

Half term girls day

Well today Id planned for me and my little girl to have a 'Girls' Day out without Thomas or Daddy!
We went swimming at the local pool in the morning where it only costs £4 for us both to go and spent the morning whizzing down the flume together and practicing her swimming.
Had a really great time and I think we were both worn out by the end of it all. We're really lucky that our council pool has such nice facilities too as they have slides and floats for the little ones and a flume and all good value + free parking as its the council pool.
I thought we might have the inevitable tantrums begin when it was time to leave so I made sure to give Alice her 10 minute, 5 minute and 2 minute warnings and to explain that we would go down the flume for the last time before getting out. I never used to do this till I saw it on Super Nanny where Jo Frost says if you were out for the night with your husband and he just suddenly told you you were leaving no time to say goodbye or drink up you'd be pretty annoyed at best so same goes for kids however small, and while it doesn't always prevent a tantrum it certainly seems to help!!

After swimming we were going for a special girls lunch, which made Alice very exited. What she didn't realise was that the truly special part was that we were going to cafe rouge to use up some clubcard vouchers there so apart from my small wine we each had a 3 course lunch entirely free.
I dont think many people realise how much more they could get for their clubcard points if you swap them for vouchers, my Cafe Rouge ones were worth 4 times the points, so our £20 lunch cost £5 in points, brilliant!!
Was really lovely to spend sometime just the two of us as Alice goes to play school most morning now and although its great to only have one of them on my hands I often feel like I'm missing out on time with my little girl.
I was so pleased with the service they knew we would be paying with vouchers but still treated us wonderfully, Alice had a lovely meal and a giant ice-cream sundae (using the kids menu which was allowed with the vouchers which was great) and was given a wonderful activity pack to keep her happy between courses with lots of French pictures/puzzles/counting etc and even some nice stickers. I attempted to remember some of my old school French to encourage her and we had a really great time filling this in(then showing off our success to Daddy when we got home!)
Alice was also bought a helium balloon which she proudly clung on to all afternoon till it finally popped!

Really really lovely day :-)
Hope your all enjoying half term too and finding ways to keep your little ones busy.

Make the most of Prescriptions

My Son Thomas has had eczema since he was about 6 months old and I used to spend a fortune on products like Oilatum etc to go in his bath as as moisturizers.
About 6 months ago my health visitor (not my doctor!) asked why I didn't get it on prescription, the doctor had never said it was possible and had only ever prescribed Diprobase and steroid creams for him. I booked him an appointment asap and guess what now alongside the normal creams we also get the Oilatum for the bath, Aveeno moisturizer and special vests made out of supersensitive material which have cuffs you can turn over at night to stop him scratching.
This has all made a world of difference for Thomas whose eczema is now although ever present manageable, and also to my bank balance as I was previously spending between £10 and £30 a month of the creams etc.
Because he is a child his prescriptions are free but with certain creams the prescription charge is still less than the retail so be brave book that appointment and tell the doctor whats wrong and go in prepared to suggest what you think you need!