Oh hi!

Leave a comment

Hello there! Thanks for stopping by to check out our truly delectable website 🙂

The more observant amongst you may have noticed that this here blog thingy hasn’t been updated in, like, FOREVER. Ah, yeah… ‘life’ kind of got in the way.

imageMmmm, cake.

Sorry, we got distracted.

Where were we? Oh yes… we’ve been a little too busy *cough* eating cake *cough* holding family baking workshops, running children’s cake decorating stalls, fundraising in all manner of exciting ways, hosting socials for our fab-u-lous bakers, being interviewed and photographed, writing annual reports like proper grown ups, judging cake competitions like Mary and Paul, and, above all else, fulfilling the birthday cake requests that come in from brilliant referrers for brilliant children so that they don’t miss out on having cake and being spoilt on the special days in their lives.

In fact, guess what? This is pretty major news so you may want to hold onto your hat if you’re wearing one. We’ve now baked over FIVE HUNDRED cakes for children who would have otherwise gone without. Now that’s a total we can be proud of. Yay!

image

So if we’re a little quiet on here, you can be pretty darned certain that it isn’t because we’re quiet in real life. Oh no. And we’re always Facebooking and tweeting what we’re up to so come and say hi over on those other corners of the tinterweb. We love it. Especially if you ‘like’ us!

Right then. Better get on with life…

We’ll leave you with some pictures from a fun little baking workshop we recently ran for a group of Hackney young carers in conjunction with Action for Children as part of Carers’ Week. These kids had it all sussed. They smashed the microwave mug cake recipe (no bananas, thanks, and woah, woah, woah, they weren’t touching a sultana!) and stormed their cake decorating challenge. Actually we’re thinking of retiring and leaving them to run this show.

Laters!

imageimageimage

Sometimes you’ve just gotta put a sieve on your head

2 Comments

IMG_9295_edited

Last month we put sieves on our heads hosted the second in our series of family baking workshops, this time at Ann Tayler Children’s Centre near London Fields.

It almost goes without saying that we had fun, a whole lot of fun! The staff were great; our bakers – who helped run the session – were great; the parents were great; and the kids? They weren’t too bad either!

We’re joking, of course – they were super great and it was fab seeing them really get stuck in, taking control of the mixing and measuring, getting creative, and yes, from time to time, sticking a sieve or two on their heads, but we won’t tell Environmental Health if you won’t!

All together now … “Ground control to Major Tom…”!

Sieves on heads weren’t the only funny occurrence mind you.  One child added an egg to the mixture.  As in, a whole egg, just popped in there with the flour, shell and all.  We heart kids!

IMG_9296_editedIMG_9290_editedIMG_9289_edited

We got some amazing feedback from the families at the session, some of which we thought we’d share here because it made us feel warm and fuzzy and because hopefully it will give you a little glimpse of why we do what we do, and why we’re so glad that we’ve expanded our service to incorporate these local baking workshops. So, from the mouths of the mums:

“I really liked cooking with my children; it was nice seeing them smile.” (We love seeing them smile too!)

“Doing the workshop helped me interact with my children more. I would usually go home and let them watch television but the workshop gave us time together.” (Baking as a family instead of watching the gogglebox = good!)

“I love cooking but don’t have the equipment so thank you for giving me all the things I need to bake with my children at home.” (Our pleasure! We love knowing that families will go on to bake at home together.)

And finally, a comment that gave us a clue that the workshop went down well… “MORE BAKING WORKSHOPS PLEASE!” (If we can, we will!)

IMG_9315_edited

So everyone went home happy, clutching their FCFK Hackney goody bags. And some carefully packaged their precious homemade muffins up to take home, while others just couldn’t wait…!

IMG_9322_edited IMG_9329_edited

Never work with children or animals…!

3 Comments

So… you know that saying, “Never work with children or animals”? Um, yeah, we kind of ignored it. There were no lions or tigers or bears, oh no, but there most certainly were children and lots and lots of them!

What are we talking about? Our baking workshop of course!

The Friday before the Friday before last, Morningside Children’s Centre – specifically, the lovely Marie – let us loose in one of their rooms to spill flour and break eggs set up a baking station that even the mighty Delia would be proud of. We zested lemons, melted butter and lined up ten sets of mixing bowls, spoons, and measuring cups in anticipation. We were then joined by ten local mums who had signed up to learn how to bake muffins with us and their children. And as the end of school approached, said children joined us too, and that’s when the fun began!

?????????????????????????????????????????????????????????????????????????????????????????????

Clad in plastic pinnies and with name badges on, the kids set about measuring out flour, bicarbonate of soda, baking powder, salt … then yoghurt, sugar, egg, melted butter … and the all important blueberries, or pear and lemon, or raisins. There was so much concentration in the air that we’d like to say you could hear a pin drop, but the reality was that you probably wouldn’t have heard a grand piano drop! Yes, it was noisy, but the children and their mums were having fun and each family managed to produce a tray of six muffin cases filled with their own unique muffin mix in no time at all.

????????????????????????????????????????????????????????????????????????????????????????????????????????????????????????????

We were up against it slightly on the cooking front. We had an oven the size of a microwave to cook 60 muffins in before the kids’ attention spans waned, but we pretty much did it and every family got to take home their buns (if they made it as far as their front doors without being consumed, that is!). And not only that, they also received a small goody bag from us including a copy of the recipe and all the equipment they needed to recreate the muffins at home, all packaged up in one of our FCFK Hackney tote bags (so expect to see a flurry of them about town!).

It was a crazy whirlwind of an afternoon but it was great fun. There are things we have learnt, of course, but we would definitely do it again, and we could quite get used to being called “Miss”! And, most importantly of all, Marie reported back that around half of the families who came told her they tried the muffins at home with their children that very weekend. We are over the moon that the workshop had the desired effect. Cooking with kids is messy and hard work, but so rewarding. We think we’ll skip cooking with animals though!

Oh, and did we mention that a photographer from the Guardian came along? No?! Ah ha! Keep checking in and all will be revealed…!  Here he is in action – a photo of a photographer taking a photo.

FCFK - Guardian photographer