Happy Easter!!!

I hope everyone had a great Easter. We've been really busy with Easter crafts, walks and a little baking. Everyone was really spoilt with chocolate eggs this year - I think we'll be eating chocolate till Christmas at this rate!

We made the traditional Crispy Cakes: Melted mars bars, rice crispies, and cadbury's mini eggs :) These were rather too morish, and no good for the wedding diet, lol! We also induldged in lots of hot crossed buns and eggs with soliders :)

The Easter Bunny must have been out in the rain, as we needed our wellies for Easter Eggs hunting this year. The kids really enjoyed it, and we were really impressed at how JJ helped his Sister to find them and didn't just grab them all for his own bucket.

Good friday family beach trip

Our 'Good Friday' family tradition is to visit the beach - come rain, or shine or snow or hail... OK, so its quite a new tradition, only 3 years standing but all traditions have to start somewhere. We were prepared for bad weather today as there is snow in some parts of the country so we packed the wellies, coats, jumpers, with the buckets and spades and headed for Sandbanks beach.

  We made all of our names out of shells - the kids had a fun collecting them in their buckets and helping to spell out their names - but I think their best game was dismantling them afterwards!

The kids had a fantastic time: paddling, chasing wet dogs, building sandcastles, collecting shells and getting generally covered in sand and seawater :D And we were lucky with the weather, although a jumper was a necessity the sun shone all day.

Oh and I couldn't resist extending my name into the domain name for a bit of shameless beach side advertising, lol!



Easter nest cupcakes

Just a quick Easter themed update, I've just whipped up some Easter Nest cupcakes for my Dad's visit this week ... OK, I say they're for my Dad but they're mostly for Mr S and the Kids ;)

They're basically just chocolate cupcakes with grassy green butter cream, a crumbled flake 'nest' and smartie/sugar bean 'eggs'. I added a bit of twist by using my mint chocolate recipe - not a particularly Eastery but they are Mr S's favourites (he's had 5 already).

Easter Tree Decorations made from Cookie Cutters

I braved the evil step ladders to venture into the loft and retrieve the Easter decorations today. I rediscovered these Easter Tree decorations I made several years ago from cookie cutters I found in a cook shop and lengths of gingham ribbon and as its such a simple idea I thought I'd share.

 In these times of recession it seems rather a pity to waste such good quality cutters, but you can pick up simple stainless steel cutters from discount shops at this time of year and either spray paint them in beautiful pastel colours or keep them simple and slightly most 'rustic' by leaving them silver and maybe using string or raffia bows.

 I reclaimed the powder sprayed cutters today (as I'm having a cutter clear out and slowly replacing plain steel with colour for quick access) and swapped them for stainless steel recyling the gingham ribbon from the original set.