In which we bake cake eggs and I lose my mind...

Minty had a little friend visiting today and I had a whole schedule of easter activities planned to keep them busy.

I was feeling ultra organised so I made some soda bread to have on hand for snacks.  I sprinkled half with cheese and left the other half plain for our dairy intolerant guest.  I pulled it out of the oven and it looked delicious… and then I remembered I had used yoghurt as the liquid component in the bread… for a dairy intolerant guest… epic fail!  Sometimes I think my brain checks out and my body is just operating on auto-pilot.  Never mind, at least I enjoyed it for lunch with some fresh tomatoes.

 The first kid's activity was making easter cards.  I set up the table with an assortment of glitter, markers, rabbit templates, cotton wool, egg shapes cut from old wrapping paper and other odds and sods.  The girls lasted about five minutes before there was a massive fight over the only pink cotton ball.  The craft table was promptly abandoned.  The kids dressed themselves as monsters and disappeared out the back door to play in the cubby house.  I was left alone with my clearly unwanted easter activities.  Thankfully rejection is easier to take when it results in some time alone to get the housework done!

A few hours later and the girls were finally happy to take on another easter activity.  In a moment of madness we decided to make these cupcakes baked inside real eggshells.  Not exactly a project geared at four year olds but considering how difficult it was, they did a pretty good job. (for a detailed how-to check out this link) I poked the holes in the top of the eggs and the kids carefully emptied the yolk and whites into a bowl.  Remarkably they only smashed one egg during this process!  Then we washed them and soaked them in salt water for half an hour.  Then we regrouped and dyed the eggs.  Turi got a bit distressed at this stage since he wanted to manhandle all the dye and almost tipped a whole bowl of blue food dye onto the carpet as he tried to defend it from prying hands!!  We powered on.  We didn't follow a recipe for the cake batter since I was pretty short on ingredients and we were baking dairy free (I actually remembered this time!!) so we just winged it.  Possibly this wasn't the wisest approach but we weren't really shooting for perfection!

Next the girls filled each egg with cake batter using a piping bag.  Cake batter kind of went everywhere but I tried to suppress my A-type perfectionist personality in the interests of fun.  Into the oven for 10 minutes.  Most of the eggs had way too much cake batter in them and so cake batter exploded out the holes in a volcanic style eruption.  Where the cake batter touched the outside of the eggs the dye was rubbed off so they ended up looking like a bit of a dogs breakfast.  I don't think the kids cared though.  They were very proud of their creations and we packaged some up for our guest to give to her unsuspecting parents. 

So all in all a fun day was had despite a few hiccups.

And then in another moment of brain meltdown I forgot I hadn't changed the clock when daylight savings ended and put the kids to bed at 6pm instead of 7pm.