My Gran's currant loaf

I am not the best cook in the world but whenever I cook my gran's currant loaf I am always asked for the recipe... so here it is. My 97 year old grandmother got this recipe out of a women's magazine in the 1950s, she has been cooking it ever since!

This currant loaf recipe was one of the first things I cooked with my kids. It has very few steps so they get the joy of mixing and I don't stress with a long list of ingredients and processes.

Ingredients:
1 generous cup of cold tea
1 cup of currants
1 cup of caster sugar (you can reduce this by a quarter to a half if you want a low sugar version)
2 cups of self raising flour
Pinch of salt

Combine the tea, currants and sugar in a bowl. Cover and leave for at least 2 hours or preferably overnight.

Line a loaf tin with baking paper. In a large bowl, combine the flour and salt. Slowly add the tea/currant mixture while stirring to avoid lumps. If a child is helping I find the whole lot is added in a fast gush..... so the mixture will need extra stirring to get rid of lumps.

Pour cake/loaf mixture into your prepared tin and bake at 180 degrees C (356F) for 50 minutes.

When cooled, slice and serve with butter.

If this is your first visit to at home with Ali – welcome. If you like it, you can follow along through our facebook page or maybe think about subscribing. Cheers Ali



Linked to Happy lil's are baking, It's Playtime and Kids Get Crafty

Guest post at A Mom With A Lesson Plan

Today I am guest posting over at one of my favourite blogs A Mom With A Lesson Plan. Please pop over and have a look at our post Building the Eiffel Tower with blocks. If you are visiting from A Mom With A Lesson Plan – welcome! I have a facebook page if you would like to follow along.

Dinosaur messy play

Two little girls recently told me that they don't like dinosaurs. I asked why and in both cases the answer was because they like fairies... huh, when did dinosaurs and fairies become mutually exclusive? Cakey likes fairies and dinosaurs, we do lots of fairy play but the dinosaur play has been dropping off lately so I thought up this fun activity.

Cakey repeatedly asks why dinosaurs are no longer alive so I thought we could have some fun experimenting with the different theories of extinction in a seriously messy way. If you hate messy play you will hate this.

I didn't tell the kids what I had planned so they were very excited...... first I got out our playdough and toy dinosaurs and asked them to create a dinosaur land on my trusty tray – green pastures, blue ocean, yellow sand, orange earth. The dinosaurs looked happy.

Next for a bit of climate change... we made some 'snow' by blending up ice. The kids took their bowls of snow and covered the dinosaurs. The dinosaurs got cold.

Now for some volcanic action... while the kids added some styrofoam volcanoes to our dinosaur land (could have just used playdough but I didn't think of that) I created a lava-like mixture of red food colouring, flour and water. Cakey poured it down the sides of the volcanoes, covering the dinosaurs underneath. The dinosaurs were buried.

Hmmm asteroid hit.... I placed a small pile of cocoa powder on the playdough and gave Cakey a ball. Boo and I stood well back as Cakey threw the ball into the cocoa to make a small cloud of brown dust to simulate an asteroid hitting the earth. This worked really well (but stay out of the way). The dinosaurs coughed.

To finish off, we flooded the dinosaurs by pouring copious amounts of water onto them. Poor dinosaurs!

This fun experiment then turned into messy play. Playdough, ice, lava, cocoa and water make for quite a mess!

If this is your first visit to at home with Ali – welcome. If you like it, you can follow our creative journey through our facebook page.



Linked to The Sunday Showcase and It's Playtime

Party hats to Princess hats

Recently, we had some time to kill before we were due at our mothers' group* play-date. Due to my poor housekeeping, there were some leftover party hats and streamers hanging around that had not been put away after Cakey's birthday party. So we decided to join the two together and turn the party hats into princess hats.

This could not be any easier. Select three streamers, twist them together and tape them to the top of the party hat - ta dah - princess hat. If you have the time and want to make it neater, you could insert the streamers into the hole at the top of the hat and secure with tape on the inside.

We didn't stop at two, they were so easy that Cakey and I made one for every kid at mothers' group... making 8 in total. Cakey really enjoyed handing them out to her friends. The hats got used in imaginary play for the rest of the week.

* My mothers' group rocks... I could not get by without them.



Linked to The Sunday Showcase, TGIF and Kids Get Crafty

Solving a key problem... or so we thought

Little kids really like keys. Boo really, really, really likes my keys. While Boo was napping, Cakey and I decided to make Boo a set of keys – copying my own set.

We kept it pretty simple. I drew the keys on thick card, Cakey decorated them and we cut them out. We covered the car key in foil just for fun and Cakey made my decorative keyring out of thick cardboard. Our hole punch kindly made a hole in each paper key into which we thread small pieces of pipe-cleaner to make keyrings. We then thread them onto a larger pipe-cleaner. Cakey is only just getting the hang of twisting pipe-cleaners closed so this was a little frustrating for her (up until now she has sticky taped them together).

I found a spare lanyard and we attached our brand new set of keys to it. Both Cakey and I were very pleased with the keys.

Cakey enjoyed playing with the keys and when Boo woke up we excitedly gave them to her. She HATES them and refuses to wear them around her neck. Oh well.... you win some, you lose some.

Linked to Link and Learn

Art and craft in the everyday

I was busy looking through my photos covering the last year or so and I noticed I have a lot of photos of our everyday art and craft activities... the bread and butter stuff that I have not blogged about. This is what the bulk of our art/craft time is spent doing – we don't sit around making Chicken World and Christmas Angel Table Lights every day. In fact, a lot of our art and craft activities are done with our pajamas on in the early morning.... and my mind does not work until I have ingested the contents of my coffee pot.

So I have put together a photo essay of the simple, non-messy, process oriented, everyday art and craft activities that we do to feed Cakey and Boo's creative souls.

We muck about with pipe cleaners

We arrange flowers

We stencil

We string beads

We stick stuff in playdough

We cover things with sticky tape

We stick pieces of paper to other pieces of paper

We make jewelry from paper and string

We make cars for toys

We thread

We make books

Did I mention we go through a lot of sticky tape?

If this is your first visit to at home with Ali – welcome. If you like it, you can follow along through our facebook page or subscribe via email or RSS. Cheers Ali

Rainbow party bags

To prepare for Cakey's rainbow-themed 4th birthday party I decided that the kids and I would make our own rainbow party bags... they were a lot of fun to make and look great.

This idea was inspired by these Valentine treat bags from Petite Elefant. Ours don't look quite so elegant but they are nice and colourful. We used cheap brown paper bags bought from the supermarket as the bade. To make the rainbow shape I simple cut round white doilies in half.

I portioned out the rainbow paint colours and Cakey, Boo and I got painting. Cakey painted one lovely, colour-correct rainbow and then decided to mix it up and put the colours out of order, paint dots and patterns.... no matter, they looked great anyway. Boo loaded her doily up with paint and then ripped it to shreds. I worked on my rainbows – Cakey was highly disappointed that I was sticking to the correct order of a rainbow – red, orange, yellow, green, blue, violet and indigo. I will never get these colours wrong again!!

Once they were dry I slipped our rainbows between the pages of a heavy book to flatten out the curly edges. When the kids were asleep I glued the rainbows onto the paper bags and filled them with party treats.

With all the excitement half the children left without party bags as I totally forgot to hand them out until part way through the exodus. I am such a party novice.

If this is your first visit to At home with Ali – welcome. If you like it, you can follow along via email, RSS or facebook. You can also find me on Pinterest and Instagram. Cheers Ali

Rainbow themed birthday party

Cakey chose a rainbow theme for her 4th birthday. It worked so well, all the kids had a wonderful time.  Here's a few of the things we did:

I covered all our tables with rainbow and unicorn wrapping paper which was inexpensive and looked great. On one table I set up a craft area to make flying rainbows with streamers which I saw on a pretty cool life. This was a simple, non-messy activity that was easy to pre-prepare before the party. I supplied paper plates cut in half with pre-cut streamers, markers, cotton wool balls for clouds, markers, glue sticks and sticky tape. Cakey and I had made prototypes before the party to hang over the table.

There were lots of toddlers attending the party so I also set up a rainbow playdough table with coloured paddle pop sticks and drink umbrellas. I made six batches of playdough (red, orange, yellow, green, blue and purple) during the week before the party. I use an easy no-cook playdough recipe so it didn't take too long (2 cups of plain flour, half cup of salt, 2 tablespoons of vegetable oil, 2 tablespoons of cream of tartar, approximately 1 and a quarter cups of boiling water with food colouring added to the water). This was a popular table!

There was lots of rainbow inspired food too – a huge platter of rainbow coloured fruit as well as paper cups full of popcorn mixed with coloured fruit loops (cheerios). I am not capable of baking a super-fancy cake but I can decorate with the best of them! I made a plain vanilla cake, iced it with butter cream icing and carefully decorated it with coloured chocolate smarties in concentric rings. And of course, we served rainbow orange jellies. The kids pounced on them. To make orange jellies, slice oranges in half and scoop out the flesh. Prepare jelly as per the packet instructions and allow to cool for 20 minutes. Pour the jelly into the empty orange halves and place in the fridge until set. Before serving cut the orange halves into quarters. Kids love them.

Rainbow cake decorated with smarties

The kids and I made our own rainbow party bags, have at a look at this post to see how they turned out. For tonnes of other party ideas check out my party, party, party Pinterest board.

If this is your first visit to At home with Ali – welcome. If you like it, you can follow along via email, RSS or facebook. You can also find me on Pinterest and Instagram. Cheers Ali

Autumn rice sensory tub and craft

It has been a while since we made our first rice based sensory tub and so I decided to make another. This time I chose an autumn theme as the leaves are just starting to change colour.

When I first saw dyed rice activities I thought "what a total pain" but I love dying rice – it is easy and fun.

I dyed the rice with food colouring in two separate batches – one pink/orange and the other yellow/lime green. I left the rice out to dry thoroughly before I gave it to the kids. I also added feathers, small pieces of yellow and orange paper, googly eyes, orange straw, fake red rose petals and lime green maple leaves.

I gave Boo the chance to play with the sensory tub on her own while Cakey was out. She enjoyed pouring the rice from container to container but was not particularly interested in the other bits and pieces.

The following day I set up some paper and glue as I thought Cakey may like to create something with the materials from the sensory tub while Boo played with it. This didn't go to plan of course... Cakey wanted to play in the tub and Boo wanted to glue. In the end play went from tub to gluing to tub to gluing back to tub.

1. Cakey's bird  2. Cakey's rice worm  3. Boo's experimentation

I made a real effort not to lead or prompt during the craft/gluing activity. I recently read an ebook from the Artful Genius (download it here, it is free) about creative thinking and imagination... and I really wanted to see where the activity would go (or not go) if I kept my mouth shut. Interestingly, Cakey chose to keep the materials separate – making rice only pictures and then making bird pictures with the feathers and eyes.

In the end the kids tipped the tub over and scattered the rice for miles... and then we spent the next half hour cleaning it up.

If this is your first visit to at home with Ali – welcome. If you like it, you can follow along through our facebook page or subscribe via email or RSS. Cheers Ali