Thank Heaven for Mrs Beeton...

... now she may have been born in 1836, but boy she's handy when you're having a cookery crisis. The girls both begged - sorry asked politely - for those cake mixture boxes when we were in the supermarket. I gave in and Hettie bought Butterfly cakes and Issy bought some Barbie mix. Both from a well known cake mix company.

So today we started. Hettie made hers and the mixture just didn't look right to me. She licked the bowl out and said it tasted funny. We removed them from the oven, and they were rubbish, and so ended up in the bin. Issy started hers and the mixture looked like slop tbh. And yes I did follow the instructions carefully!! I didn't even bother baking them.

We'll go back to the proper old fashioned way of baking fairy cakes I said, reaching for Mrs Beeton. In fact we really did go back because I had no self raising flour, so it had to be plain and add baking powder. Well Mrs Beeton won the day and we finally produced 12 cakes which looked like they were edible. Actually being on a diet the ones I threw in a bin looked quite edible to me!
After finally producing something worth decorating we made Issy's pink butter icing from the pack. It was Yuk, no-one liked it, so after my arm nearly falling off beating it, the whole lot went in the bin. By now I was getting a tad grumpy. So I made normal butter icing for Hettie and pink icing for Issy!

Girls spent a happy hour decorating their cakes. Unfortunately I can't find my camera, so no pics but the girls and dh said they tasted good. No I didn't eat one, I'm on a diet.

Other than taking 3 hours to produce 12 small cakes, I washed and ironed all day.

Our loft conversion starts in 3 weeks and so I really need to get sorting all the stuff that is stored up there. Strangely enough one of the builders employees is the grandparent of HE children and so hopefully there will be minimal disruption. Ok who am I trying to kid? They've already told Hettie she can go and learn carpentry!!