Rainy Day {Halloween} Activities

The weather has been terrible here today! We'd planned to go to Crealy, but when we woke up this morning and saw/heard that the rain was pouring down, and had been all night, we quickly changed our plans!

Liam has been off work yesterday, today and tomorrow as it is half term and he had quite a few days of holiday to use up before the end of the year. It was good to have him around to help out with the rainy day activities! This morning he and Izzy did Halloween craft from her newest magazine.

Izzy had great fun and we now have lots of Halloween decorations!

We stopped mid-morning to snack on Samoa Bars. Mine didn't turn out quite as prettily as Averie's - more brown and spread out, I'm thinking my pan was too big - and I couldn't get a good photo of them for the life of me (I miss my camera!!), but they tasted delicious!

Averie's Caramel Apple Bars are still my favourite, but these make a nice change - sweet and chocolatey with a hint of coconut.

After eating it was time for more playing...

And then lunch - fried egg and Linda McCartney sausage sandwich, mmm!

This afternoon it was my time to have fun with Izzy with some baking - Halloween baking!

We made two batches of cupcakes - one vanilla, and one chocolate mint:

For the vanilla cupcakes, Izzy iced them with a simple icing glace icing...

and then I added cocoa powder to the remaining icing and piped/dragged it to make cobwebs:

These worked quite well, but the white icing set quicker than I could put the chocolate icing on so the webs didn't drag as much as I would have liked. I'm sure if you were icing the cakes yourself you wouldn't have that problem though - 5 year-olds take longer to knife white icing on than adults do!

Despite the fun that Izzy had making and icing the cakes, her favourite bit always comes afterwards - eating leftover icing!

For the chocolate-mint cakes (after the children's bath time, hence the clothes change) I made green peppermint flavoured butter icing...

Which I piped onto the cakes, and then Izzy topped with 'pumpkin' wrapped chocolates...

Ta da!

Before we changed our plans this morning because of the weather, I'd been planning to make these cupcakes on Saturday. I just hope we've still got some left by the time Monday comes around!!

Are you doing anything this weekend/on Monday to celebrate Halloween? Last year, I took Izzy trick or treating with some of her friends, but I've decided against doing that this year. Instead we will just go round to my Mum's and do apple bobbing, hands in green spaghetti etc. She'll have just as much fun, and it means Toby can join in too. Also, tomorrow we will go to Crealy and carve a pumpkin - that's the thing she's been looking forward to most this half term! The weather is meant to be better tomorrow, fingers crossed!

Smoothie "ice cream"

This morning I didn't really get moving properly - apart from lying on the sofa to write a blog post, my brain was all foggy! Consequently I didn't end up eating breakfast until almost 11am, so decided to keep it light. I whizzed up a smoothie with just a banana, some frozen raspberries, a little milk and a pinch of Xanthan gum...

This was fab! My daughter, of course, loved the bright colour!

Really tasty too, no need for any added sweetness :) I'm really glad I tried out a simpler smoothie version, this will make a perfect healthy substitute for all the ice cream my daughter likes to consume in summer (well anytime of the year really, whenever my sister takes her out, she wants to go to the seafront for ice cream!)

Healthy, bright pink "ice cream"... ideal for a 4 year old, or for this 24 year old's light breakfast! :)

For lunch, I tried out Mama Pea's Sloppy Josephine recipe, although I used tinned green lentils rather than dry puy lentils for convenience...

This was really delicious, I loved the flavour of Worcester sauce and BBQ sauce in it, really tasty, if a little messy...

loved by all, although the others did have fried chorizo slices as a garnish, which according to Liam "made it"...hmmm, at least I got him eating a healthy lentil mix alongside the chorizo!! I went back for sloppy seconds...very sloppy seconds - there was more left over than I'd realised!

This will definitely be one that we make again, so good! A bigger lunch than we normally have as we were off to a friend's house late afternoon so I wasn't sure if we'd be back in time to cook much for dinner.

Before we went out, I snacked on the last lemon drizzle cupcake (well Liam had one too, I'm not a complete piggy!!)...

these are so good, although my weight will probably be glad that they're gone!!

We then went over to my friend's house, about half an hour drive away. She has a son the same age as my daughter so she was entertained, and they'd got a new puppy yesterday so he kept the baby amused! Didn't eat anything at my friend's, just had a glass of squash, so didn't get my camera out.

When we got back, Liam made us all poached eggs on toast...

as my daughter says (when she makes us cut all our eggs open to check!), these were perfectly "olky"!

Yum, we hadn't had poached eggs on toast for ages, a simple but tasty meal.

Once I'd put the children to bed, I ate the last chocolate raspberry cupcake (minus the last raspberry on top which had gone mouldy, yuck!)...

I think chocolate cakes are actually nicer a couple of days after baking, less dry :) All the cakes are gone now though, phew! There are still lots of chocolate oat cookies but I find them easier to resist so hopefully I'll be able to get back on track tomorrow!