On it being the taking part and not the winning that counts

Despite my rant the other day I eventually caved in to the inevitable pleasure of making cakes. Pink’s cake required slightly more input from me, and I ended up slapping on the chocolate icing at 10.30 last night. Blue, on the other hand pretty much recreated his Rocky Road himself and from scratch (with the help of the original Nigella recipe we’d looked at, because the Homework book where he’d written down his original recipe was at school. What-have- I-forgotten-Wednesday revealed that I had mainly forgotten a few of the main ingredients for the Rocky Road (as well as mushrooms for the mushroom risoniotto on the menu early next week – fairly crucial, that) so we had a quick dash to the Co-Op between afterschool dental appointments and Rainbows, but he managed to have his confection in the fridge by the time we had to go back to Rainbows to get Pink.

Tea was a bit of an ‘on the run’ affair – the menu planner said salmon and pea pastas but my heart wasn’t in it, so I pan-fired the salmon and served with with noodles and then a mixture of spring onions and frozen peas and sweetcorn which I stir fired with some soy sauce in the pan I’d cooked the salmon in. Not the most gourmet affair, but I managed not to overcook the salmon and the kids really enjoyed it which was excellent because I’m not great at getting fish on the menu, despite my efforts: I always seem to get sidetracked and leave it in the freezer. No time to ice and decorate Pink’s entry before bedtime, and anyway the Rocky Road was still in the fridge, and I ended up, as I’ve said, icing the choc sponge just before I went to bed.

Despite finding some icing and blue and green food colouring in the cupboard, I resisted the urge (and I really did have an urge) to create some dinky little ‘fairtrade’ flowers (well, they were dinky in my imagination). Common sense did prevail. What we did do was a bit of cutting out and dusted cocoa and icing sugar over the top of both cakes, and voila:


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Fairtrade old fashioned chocolate cake -
thanks Nigella

 Pink wrote on her label for the tin:

Faretrade coclete +suger+iceing suger +coco for cake compitson .

Well, at least she knows how to spell ‘cake’ properly.



The 'rocky road' to Fairtrade (groan)

I
 I expect that by the time the cakes get judged the rocky road will have warmed up sufficiently for the decoration to have been absorbed back into the chocolate, but there we go - it looked good. Now have to resist the temptation to email the picture to the school office to prove what it looked like first thing this morning. After all it's not the winning that counts, it's the taking part...