This little one started Nursery this week. I can’t believe what a big step this feels like. All the time we are marching on towards that September when my little girl will head off to School. It’s making me all the more determined to make the most of this precious period in our lives when my girl and I can spend days together during the week, because they will soon be over. Eeek!
One of the best things we love doing together is baking. I am pretty sure Orla loves it just because she gets to lick the spoon at the end. But I love the whole process of us working together to make something that we then get to sit down and enjoy together.
The other week we spent a day making these heart cupcakes. I have has a silicone heart cake mould for years and haven’t really gotten much use out of it. Since we have re-organised the kitchen I am more determined to make good use of the things we own, so I decided it was time to put this to use again.
I used this BBC Good Food recipe for mini Victoria sponge cakes.
Things were a bit bumpy on top, but seven years of watching the Great British Bake Off are beginning to rub off on me and I had the brain wave (or actually the really blindingly obvious idea) to simply slice the top off the cakes to get a more uniform heart shape appearance. It worked beautifully!
The best bit of doing this was that it then meant I had eight cake tops left over that Orla could then decorate to her heart’s content, whilst I was then able to decorate the real cakes to how I liked them!
The results were maybe not Bake Off perfection, and maybe you would look at these and think maybe a three year old did decorate them after all, but I was really pleased with these! Pretty, sweet and rather dainty.
They tasted rather fabulous too, and I’m afraid they didn’t last very long, but the best thing is that it was another afternoon spent having fun with Orla. I don’t believe in treasuring every moment as a parent, *gives side-eye to the four months of colic hell* but I do believe there are moments in every day to treasure. I have found that baking days in particular provides those treasure trove moments in spades, and that’s why I heart baking days!
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