Saturday was cold and wet here in Melbourne…

In fact, it was the perfect kind of day to get the children together and do something fun and creative in the kitchen.

I have fond memories from my childhood of having baking days with my Dad, of bread rolls sitting near the fireplace to activate the yeast, of helping to fill home made jam tarts, delicious steak and kidney pies straight from the oven…and rolling and plying and playing with my lump of pastry for so long that, according to my mother, I’d turn it grey before it got anywhere near to the oven.

They are the kind of memories that childhood are made from.  They are the kinds of memories I hope to fill my children’s banks up with.

As I have confessed before, I am not really your cakey-bakey type of mum, so I enlisted the help of my favourite Baker girls, once again, this time in the form of a Hoppy Easter Cupcake Bites Rescue Kit.

The kit makes 36 cupcake bites, and as it so happened, turned out to be perfect as it meant that The Woo, Foghorn and Bubble all had their own tray of 12 to work with.  Hallelujah!  No fighting!

So this is how they are supposed to look when complete…

However, I quickly ascertained that the likelihood of me being able to successfully co-ordinate a 2, 3 and 5 year old into spelling out these three words across their collective trays woudl have been a headache waiting to happen.  So in keeping with the general air of sibling harmony I opted to let them keep their trays seperate, and instead suggested thatthey each do their own name.

So…although ours turned out a tad different from the kit, we still had lots of fun!

The instruction card which you may have heard me raving about when I made the Cricket Stadium cake and the Aussie Thong cake, also proved very popular with The Woo and Foghorn.  The images enabled them to take charge of the activity and even helped to encourage some (dare I say it?) unprompted team work!  You’ve got to love that!

We did take a little detour off the instruction card though, and took a littl erisk by adding some frozen raspberries and white chocolate chips.  This may or may not have been my idea.

After everyone had had their 375 turns of stirring the mixture (or very close to) we got the disposable muffin trays ready by popping our ready shaped baking paper into the holes.

Next they took great care filling their little cases with the mixture.  When I say ‘they’ I actually mean the boys took great care.  Bubble finished hers in record time and used up so much of the mixture that she ended up having to donate some back to the community so that the boys’ cupcake bites didn’t end up looking more like very small biscuits.  You’ve got to love her enthusiasm though.

I whizzed up the green icing (as I thought that the last thing my horrible old kitchen needed was a make over with green food colouring) and then the children were off again, following their little instruction card and hoping desperately for the phone to ring, or for me to need to go to the toilet so they could plant their faces head first into the green icing and lick the bowl.

Fortunately, my strict top-all-of-the-cakes first policy seemed to work, and there was plenty left over at the end for finger dipping!

I think perhaps the children’s favourite part of the activity was rolling out the fondant (rolling pin included), cutting out letters (alphabet cookie cutters included) and plying the mixture into rabbits, and carrots and flowers.  Again they referred to the instruction card images to do this and the boys were able to work independently and confidently on their little edible masterpeices.

Bubble, fortunately thought it was playdoh and so didn’t eat it as she was playing with it.

Ironically, had it actually been play doh I am sure she would have been more compelled to eat it.  Kids are strange like that aren’t they?

Pride is just written all over his face isn’t it?

And…I am happy to report that the raspberry and white choc gamble paid off remarkably well.  They tasted delicious!

For more information on the Cake 2 the Rescue cake kits and cupcake bites kits you can go to their website or Facebook page.  They are developing new designs all the time and are open to suggestion and happy to create something tailored to your needs.

Also you can go here to enter our competition to one of 10 prizes from the Baker Girls at Cake to the Rescue and here to enter the competition to win a Hoppy Easter rescue kit.

And yes…you are right…I desperately need a new kitchen.  It has been put on the to-do list save-up-for-list and in the scheme of things has beenplaced third in line after concrete the shed/lady cave and fix the spa heater, and at this rate is likely to be completely several months after hell freezes over!