Christmas Tree Cakes

So here's the '12 Days of Christmas Arts and Crafts' Day 2!  Sadly the wreath still isn't finished - when I asked Riley if he wanted to do art this afternoon he looked at me like I was crazy and just said 'no'.  Oh well.  But he did want to bake, so we made Christmas tree cakes.  They're a great alternative to Christmas Cookies - I knew Riley wouldn't have the patience to cut out dozens of fancy shapes carefully.  They're really simple.

We made a basic sponge cake mix (4oz sugar, 4oz marg, 4oz s/r flour, 2 eggs) and baked it in a square cake pan, traybake style.  Then when it was cool, I cut it into 3 strips, then cut each strip into triangles and let Riley loose with some thick, bright green glace icing (just the icing sugar, a tiny bit of water and some green food colouring) and some silver balls.  He thought it was great!

The recipe that I got the idea from (Practical Parenting and Pregnancy, Jan '11 - though I did tweak it slightly) said to stick marshmallows on the base of the triangles for trunks, but our cake wasn't deep enough, so unless you're in the know, they just look like weird green triangles!!!!  I was really pleased with how well they came out - Riley did a really good job with them (and Freya did a very good job of eating all the offcuts!!!!)  Here's his finished plateful.....

A Busy Day

We've done an awful lot today, so I've got two snippets of our lives to show you.  First of all, we made crispie cakes.

As with all our cooking, Riley was very pleased with himself!  And like most pre-schoolers, a good few spoonfuls never made it into the cases and went straight into his mouth!!!

Our second project of the day turned into a bit of an epic, particularly when you consider Riley's normal concentration span.  I decided to let him loose with the glitter glue again after he had so much fun a couple of weeks ago - totally open ended, no finished result in mind.  Well he squirted until the tubes were empty, then mixed it all up with a glue spreader.

Then he started asking for collagey bits - pretty much everything in the box!  Craft foam flowers, pom-poms, sequin confetti stars, foam shapes, little bits of shiny paper and foil, chocolate coin foils - he kept asking for more and more, and they all got squished into the glitter glue until you could hardly see it anymore.  He was at it for ages and thought it was absolutely wonderful.  Here's the finished piece:

And I was very happy to be informed that Mickey Mouse is in the centre of the page!  He's purple and a bit wonky, but once you know he's there you can spot him.  I'm so pleased that Riley's starting to create 'things' under his own steam finally.  I can't wait to see what he'll make next.