Cake and cuddles.

Today K finally got round to making the cake that she's been planning to make since the weekend.  She asked for a recipe and to be left to it, so I told her to weigh 3 eggs and add the same amount of flour, sugar and butter, then add a teaspoon of baking powder and a tablespoon of cocoa (because she wanted to make a chocolate one).  She hasn't made a big cake before rather than fairy cakes, so I showed her how to line one of the tins and she did the other.  I helped a bit with putting the mixture into the tins, but K did it pretty much all by herself. 

Baking

She also put the cakes in and took them out of the oven, which she hasn't been comfortable doing before.  Having decided that she wanted cream in the middle she went to the shop to get some and then returned because she'd forgotten that I had told her to check if we had enough icing sugar and to get some if we needed more.

For the decoration she took inspiration from a cake on The Great British Bake Off, which I'm sure you'll recognise if you watch it.  So here it is, her chocolate cake, with whipped cream and strawberry jam in the middle and chocolate icing on top.

It was very good!

We also had piano lessons today (they're usually on a Tuesday, but the lovely flexible teacher is fine with changing the day with notice).  K & M are both still getting on well and it's still lovely to have a little bit of one to one time with each of them, even if it is only half an hour.  M & I went to the park but on the way spotted some rather strange looking things on the leaves of a tree.  We stopped to talk to a lady who was just going into the house by the tree, who said it was a lime tree but that she didn't know what they were either.

Galls apparently.

When we got home, Facebook provided the answer, that they are galls (which makes me think of Asterix and Obelix, but it's not that sort).  A bit of googling found out that these particular ones are caused by a tiny mite that it about 0.2mm long, so we had a look on a ruler at just how small that is.

M and I had a bit of a chat too, as she seems to have been a bit 'down' lately, sometimes for obvious reasons, such as having a negative reply about the Blue Peter badge she'd applied for, but also just generally.  She told me she didn't really know why, but later she came back to the conversation and said she'd been missing Daddy.  It's a really tricky one, as he does work long hours and often travels, although rarely for longer than a night or two, but he's often late home from meetings in other parts of the country, but it's thanks to his job that we are in the very fortunate position of not having to make the big sacrifices that the vast majority of HEers do in order to have the option of this way of life.  We've been having lots of cuddles and happily A was home in order for us all to eat together tonight, which doesn't happen very often.  Now that K & M are getting more flexible with mealtimes, we'll be able to do that more frequently I hope.

K had decided to take a card game to play while M had her lesson and chose Phase 10.  It started off extremely one-sided with her winning all the hands, but by the time M had finished her lesson it had turned around completely and I was ahead.  We finished at home this evening, after I'd read another chapter of Going Solo, during which Roald Dahl had been given wrong directions for finding where to join his RAF squadron and consequently crashed when landing his plane, fractured his skull, (temporarily) lost his sight, taken 6 months to recover and returned to flying.

Despite the disappointment that M's poem has not been enough to win her a Blue Peter badge, she hasn't been put off thankfully and the girls watched another episode online.  Among other things on the programme there were ideas that children had to challenge themselves over the summer.  M was quite taken by one suggestion of playing the piano blindfold, so we did have a go at doing a video of her doing just that, rather successfully I might say.  We weren't completely happy with the result, but may well have another go in the next few days and try sending that in, in another attempt to get a badge.  K is also still keen, but has yet to come up with anything that she could make or do.

In other news, M has decided to give DragonBox another go and has worked through the first chapter, which is 20 problems.  She told me that she hasn't got three stars for all of them, but she's planning on doing what K did and go back once she's finished and do any that she didn't get all the stars for again until she does.

And finally, (arachnophobes you'd probably best stop reading now and there will be photos) K & M are really rather keen on spiders at the moment, specifically three particular spiders who live in our garden.  They have been named Simon, Sam and Oliver and K & M like to track there whereabouts.  One of them, I'm ashamed to say I don't know which, really endeared himself to me today though, when I saw him lunching on a wasp!

Lunchtime!