Crafting with kids: homemade playdough

What do you do on a Bank Holiday weekend when outside the weather is miserable (in spite of the calendar blatantly lying by telling me it's May)? How do you keep your toddler entertained?
This morning, to answer these scary questions I thought: let's play with playdough!
I had bought a few months ago a tub of playdough, that Little Miss has played with perhaps  three or four times. I opened the tub this morning and the dough was rock hard. Mmmm...
I vaguely remembered seeing on Pinterest a website with homemade playdough recipes, so I quickly looked it up and there it was, a whole website full!
Playdoughrecipe.org has a variety of recipes from peanut butter to pumpkin pie dough, from glittery to chocolate dough but also the classic recipe that is natural enough for kids to play safely with, but doesn't smell too good (just in case they find it yummy!) or involve complex operations. You can find the recipe here.

The very basic cupboard ingredients (flour, cream of tartar, cooking oil, food colouring, salt, water) make it a super cheap, easy and fun project to do.
I involved Little Monkey in the preparation, asking her to mix the ingredients in a big bowl. I then put the mixture on the fire, which after briefly boiling, soon bunched up in a big ball.

 

I let it cool down away form the fire for a few minutes, then kneaded it a bit, and there it was, wonderfully soft and ready to play with. Best of all, if the dough is kept in an air-tight container in the fridge, it will last for a year!
My little one is almost two and, like any toddler, difficult to sit still for more than a few minutes: I am not exaggerating, she sat down playing with the dough for one and a half hours...we used cookie cutters and pens and any other everyday object we could find to give shape to the playdough, including making a mini-pizza in true Italian style!

Another plus of this easy craft project is that, by following the recipe's quantities, I ended up with lots of dough, which I divided in small food containers, ready to give as presents to Little Monkey's friends.
Can't think of any other craft project easier and more fun than this!

Weekend baking delight: sugar-free banana cake

We just said goodbye to a couple of dear friends, who have a three-year-old girl, after a weekend of food, food and more food...this is what usually happens when friends stay over at ours, the whole weekend revolves around two questions: "what do we eat for lunch?" and "what do we eat for dinner?".
Both my husband and I immensely enjoy entertaining and cooking, it's our way of showing love to the people we care about.
This time, while the girls played nicely, I decided to make my favourite baby-friendly cake. It is so popular with little miss that it was her first birthday cake last summer.
This fruit cake is lovely, sweet and moist, yet it's sugar-free, as all the sweetness comes from the banana and the dried fruit. Using wholemeal floor adds fibre and makes this a very nutritious (and yummy!) treat.
I found this recipe in a book called "The baby-led weaning cookbook" when looking for healthy treats for my baby (as a new mum, you read every single label and often are shocked by the amount of junk you can find in pre-packed baby food...so whenever I can, I make food for her myself). 
The book has lots of useful tips on weaning a baby without going through the fiddly (and messy) carrot purees, and although I didn't follow it word by word, I did take the advice very often with happy-baby results!

 
So here it is the Sugar-Free Banana Cake
  
Ingredients:

• butter for greasing
• 100g self-raising wholemeal flour (or 100g plain flour with 2 tsp baking powder)
• 1/2 tsp ground mixed spice
• 50g unsalted butter
• 75g raisins (I use a mix of raisins and dried cranberries, they give a slightly tangy flavour to it)
• 200g mashed ripe bananas
• 50g walnuts, ground or finely chopped (optional)
• 1 egg, beaten

for the filling / topping:

• 200g cream cheese (but I use mascarpone, I think it works better)
• 50-100g 100% fruit spread (I use strawberry or figs)

Preheat the oven to 180°C/350°F/Gas Mark 4 and lightly grease a 450g loaf tin.
Sift the flour  into a large bowl and add the spices.Cut or break the butter into small cubes and add it to the flour. Using your hands, or a food processor, rub the butter into the flour until the mixture looks like fine breadcrumbs. Stir in the dried fruit and make a well in the centre of the mixture.
In a separate bowl mash the banana, add the walnuts and stir in the egg. Pour the banana mixture into the flour mixture and fold in.
Put the mixture into the cake tin and put it in the oven, turn down the oven to 160°C/325°F/Gas Mark 3 and bake for 45-60 minutes. Let it cool on a rack.
You can serve it plain, with natural Greek yogurt, or you can mix the mascarpone and fruit spread and make a filling and topping for your lovely cake.

For little miss' birthday, I made this cake in a round cake tin using double doses and decorated it as a giant ladybird. It was my first attempt at cake decoration using sugar fondant. I made the fondant myself, and I don't know what went wrong (therefore I'm not giving you the recipe!), but the sugary paste started cracking horribly while I was laying it on the cake...the night before the party, my husband and I spent nearly 6 hours to decorate this cake, and thank goodness he is a very skilled guy when it comes to crafts...you can see him in these pictures trying to painstakingly smooth the surface of the cake (and you start to understand how he often saves me from disastrous situations!)

The final result looked and tasted good, I thought, and you can see how not only the kids enjoyed it...

Our friend Alessandro with crumbles all over his face