My babys artwork- of which I am very proud!

Sophie is 13 going on 30, with a very bizarre sence of humor,she has many talents but her drawings amaze me, she is so creative and I wanted to add this blog so hopefully she can see how fab she is.

This face of Elvis she painted on a large canvas and from a distance it looks amazing

(it looks good up close too)

Face paints - Sophie painted all of Alex's friends at his Hawaiian party.

Her style of drawing varies from very stange to very cute,

Gingerbread bird houses to mansions!!

Christmas is getting close so today we decided to start the annual Parson's Gingerbread building contest!
We have tried many different recipes in the past but we have found, (I say we, I mean Rich as he is the best cook in our house) that this is the best one.

Recipe for easy GINGERBREAD:

250g grams of unsalted butter

250g muscovado sugar

7 tablespoons of golden syrup

 Melt the above ingredients in a saucepan over a

medium heat, stirring continously.

Then mix in a separate bowl

600g of plain flour

2 teaspoons of bicard of soda

3 teaspoons of ground ginger

Mix the wet ingredients into the dry until all mixed together.

Rollout onto  greaseproof paper and cook at 160 degrees for 12 minutes.

 The gingerbread hardens as it cools.

Stick together with icing sugar and enjoy!!!

For Casey I decided to buy a shop made house as she was desperate to start decorating and we hadn't even cooked our houses, being two, she got stuck in and loved adding and eating the sweets to her house.

She was very eager to show her house off and as she held it up for a photo .......

She dropped it....

But all was OK as I caught it!!!

Sophie, Shannon and Alex designed their houses on paper first, then we cut out the template of the walls and roof and transferred the shapes to the freshly made, warm gingerbread and sliced around them.
In the past we have tried to bake sheets of gingerbread and cut them out after, we found this didn't work and broke into bits which ended up with us having to eat it!!!

Shannon spent a very long time decorating her bungalow, Casey helped with the snow icing sugar, he he.

The girls added boiled sweets to the windows to create a stained glass effect.

Alex drew a lovely green house with lots of detail but he also was desperate to build and decorate so we scaled his one down (we managed to get both houses out of one mix) but it ended up looking like a bird house, oopps.

And lastly, Sophie's and Daddys design. As always Rich tends to go a little over the top when it comes to somethings, well actually most things. Three lots of gingebread was required to make the walls alone, we actually had to add supports inside to allow for the weight of the roof!

The Gingerbread mansion measured nearly 40 cm in height and Sophie worked her magic with the decorating,all in all a very sucessfull Gingerbread making session for Christmas 2010.

Hello out there!

'Carnival of my life', well its all the fun of the fair, with its ups and downs of the ferris wheel, the excitement and screams of the roller coaster and the scary, fearful bit of the ghost train, my life has been and will continue to be like a one big trip to the fair!!!