Longing for warmer weather

I'm feeling a bit meh about winter.  I usually feel this way in February, watching for signs of spring.  The days are longer now, which is very welcome, but I'd like a little warmth to go with it.


In the meantime, Freddie continues to play on the Wii *a lot*, and Betsy has been baking *a lot*.


Mum came over one day last week with a Dora the Explorer baking magazine.  I came with a Dora plate and some muffin cases.

Betsy was very excited and we made the muffins from the recipe inside.  Well, sort of.  We added cocoa powder as Betsy will only bake chocolate items!

We baked a few more chocolaty treats over the next few days.


We have this childrens cook book.  It's got a good brownies recipe in it, that isn't too rich.

We don't often use it for much else, but we tried a couple of the other recipes.


First up, biscuits.  They were meant to be ginger, but we ditched the spice and added cocoa!

They were very tasty.  Betsy cut out lot of hearts in honour of Valentines Day.  She wanted to do the dinosaurs for Freddie, and the 2s for her.

The next day we made a cake, from the same recipe book.

It's meant to be a sandwich cake, but as Betsy (and Freddie ) don't like icing or frosting or anything like that we made one layer only and left it plain.

It was delicious!


We did manage to get out of the door today.  It's been difficult - Meg's been sick, it's been so cold and the lure of the fire has been too much to resist.  But this morning the sun was shining, it was slightly less cold so we went to the playground.


The ice on the canal is slowly thawing.  Today we noticed lots of cracks and puddles.

We fed some very hungry ducks.

The playground was empty, which surprised me as it's half term.

We headed to the supermarket to pick up some batteries for the Wii remote (an essential purchase!) and stopped at the cafe there for a mid morning pick me up.  Meg made a break for the kitchen but I caught her before she got in a pickle.  Freddie and Betsy had their Costa snacks of choice (Freddie - biscotti, Betsy - chocolate brownie).  I may have eaten a caramel shortbread....

Although it was cold and windy, I was so happy to be in the sunshine!   Roll on the spring.