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All PTAs try to put on as many engaging events as they can, not only to raise some much needed funds for the children at their school, but also to bring a bit of fun in if possible. The Wonka Bar event is a popular one with school PTAs but how does it work? Continue reading How Does the Wonka Bar PTA Event Work?
For my son’s 7th birthday I wanted to make a digger construction birthday cake but I am a once a year theme cake baker so it needed to be something relatively simple!
I obviously went to Pinterest to gather some ideas and amalgamated a few options to come up with an easy cake for me to make.
The cake is made up of 2 sections – for the bottom section I made a standard Victoria sponge cake but used the traditional method of mixing the butter (actually Stork) and caster sugar, before adding the eggs, self-raising flour and other ingredients. I made sure I whisked the eggs first and also sifted the flour.
As I was using a big 9 inch tin I did two bakes each with the following ingredients:
140g caster sugar
140g butter/Stork
3 eggs
140g self-raising flour
1 level tsp baking powder
2 tblsp milk
I cooked each cake for around 20 minutes at 175 degrees C.
These cakes came out really nicely – soft, fluffy and moist. I let them cool off and then levelled them so that I could stack them. I used a filling of jam and buttercream.
Once this bottom layer was flat I put a crumb coat of butter icing over it, rolled out one 250g pack of yellow fondant icing
For the top layer I made a chocolate cake. I don’t make many chocolate cakes I have to admit as I don’t really eat them but I’m so glad I got this recipe from BBC Good Food as it was really tasty (maybe with the yoghurt added it was more moist?).
I halved the ingredients shown in the recipe (as I only had one smaller but deep 7 inch cake tin) and made 2 cakes (I whisked the 3 eggs up and measured out half of that mixture for each cake). These cakes rose really well so I had a fair amount of spare bits to eat when I levelled the cakes off!
The chocolate butter cream was really tasty – I just made half as I was planning on covering the cake in yellow fondant.
I used some of the butter cream for a crumb coat and then used another 250g pack of yellow fondant (plus a bit that was left from the base) to cover it.
Then it was just a case of digging out some of the cake and making it into crumbs. I had given a couple of my son’s toys a good clean to use on the cake and had bought some cute cones from Amazon. I already had a box of letter cutters that I had bought a few years ago so used some more black icing to make his name.
As I say, I am pretty much a once year baker but was happy with how this turned out and he loved it too!
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I was wanting to make some decorations for outside my house for Halloween this year and one thing I wanted to figure out was how to make a giant halloween spider that could hang from my upstairs window and look pretty spooky! Continue reading How to Make a Giant Halloween Spider
So when I first got my Lay-z-spa Saint Tropez hot tub I bought the chlorine granules to keep the water in the spa clean. These worked really well as they kept the chlorine at the correct level after a shock dose and then adding 2 teaspoons a day of the granules to the water.
In fact I had no problems with this at all except that my only issue was having to make sure I was doing this whether I was using the hot tub or not that day. So I decided that it would make sense to try out the chlorine tablets with the special dispenser that came with the hot tub. Continue reading LayZSpa ChemConnect Dispensing Too Much Chlorine
For an event we were running as a PTA we wanted to sell monster donuts to the children and adults who were coming so we looked around for a recipe for monster doughnuts that we could easily make.
We weren’t actually going to make the monster doughnuts ourselves but instead buy some and decorate them with monster faces. The ones that we had seen on Pinterest had edible eyes and then plastic mouths that opened over the hole of the donut (which you can buy very cheaply online) but we didn’t want to use any more plastic than we needed to so we decided to go another route with the monster mouths! Continue reading Monster Doughnuts With No Plastic!
