Where the hell have we been?!

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We’re sorry, we know you’ve no doubt been checking our website on an almost daily basis wondering when the bloody hell we were going to get on and post something else. We haven’t just been sitting around watching daytime telly, we can assure you of that; we’ve been busy, as in mega, mega busy!

FCFK - 336 candlesIf you’re one of our likers on good ol’ Facebook, or if you follow us on twitter then you’ll have some idea of what we’ve been up to these past months, from fundraising to celebrating our bakers with a big party, not to mention keeping the good ship FCFK Hackney ticking over as we bake more cakes than ever (336 was our total at the end of February). We’ll be writing a bit more about all that soon, but, right now, we wanted to chat money!

A little while ago now we put in for a BBC Children in Need grant and completed a rather rigorous application process. We knew that the competition for the money would be immense so, whilst we had our fingers permanently crossed, we’d told ourselves not to be too disappointed if we didn’t get the funding. But guess what? We only went and got. the. funding! Yes, yes we did!

FCFK - Skipton fundingWhile this was going on, we also applied for a Skipton Building Society ‘Grassroots Giving’ grant. You may remember this because it was down to the public vote who got the money and we spent a considerable amount of time badgering you lovely lot to vote for us. Well, our badgering your voting paid off and we got the grant. Whoop! (Witness a happy TEAM FCFK Hackney in the photo on the right in receipt of our grant from Skipton.)

Meanwhile, some rather generous companies out there – the awesome Adams Catering Hire and Chegworth Valley Juices, we’re looking at you – decided that Christmas wouldn’t be Christmas unless they gave us some cash. So they did. And we were, and still are, massively grateful. Unlike the grants, this ‘unattached’ money means that we can pay for some of the more mundane costs associated with the running of FCFK Hackney, like DBS checks and insurance, and it takes the pressure off us having to fundraise like crazy when we have other things on our plate, like…

FCFK - Long White Cloud bakers…family baking workshops. Yep, that’s what the applications for the Children in Need and Skipton grants were all about. We were so encouraged by the two baking workshops that we held previously – and the response we got from the children and their parents/carers who then went on to bake at home as a family using our equipment and basic recipe – that we really wanted to expand our service to offer more of the same. The grants will enable us to do just that and we’ve already done our training session (thanks to Long White Cloud on Hackney Road for hosting us and our rather large collection of blue mixing bowls) and have a whole series of baking workshops lined up, starting at the end of this month (eeek, better get our pinnies ironed!). We can’t wait to get started properly and are particularly excited to be involving some older young people (if that makes sense) from Think Forward to help deliver our workshops.

Ok, we reckon we’ve waffled on enough now, so we’ll leave you with some shots of the muffins and the microwave mug cakes, for families without ovens, that we’ve been trialing ahead of the workshops. And stay tuned because we’ve got a whole backlog of Cake of the Months to post and we’d love it if each baker gets their moment to shine.

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

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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!

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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!)

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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…!

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Fool-proof muffin recipe (not that we’re going to call you a fool if you can’t make them)

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WARNING: This post contains images of cute kids baking.  If you have a low tolerance for cute then you may want to look away.

We thought we’d share the muffin recipe we used at our kids’ baking workshop here with you as it is frankly just so simple that the whole world should have a go. One of the mums, Raby, who joined us on the workshop sent us some lovely photos of her children baking the muffins at home with the kit they’d got in their FCFK Hackney goody bag. She said it was the first time she’d baked with her children and now, as we’re sure you’ll be able to tell from the pictures, they are huge fans and it’s a new family activity for them. We couldn’t have made it up.

Long live the fool-proof muffin!

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This recipe makes around 12 muffins.

3 CUPS PLAIN FLOUR
1 TABLESPOON BAKING POWDER
1/2 TEASPOON BICARBONATE OF SODA
1/2 TEASPOON SALT
2 EGGS BEATEN
3/4 CUP LIGHT BROWN SUGAR
1 CUP YOGHURT OR BUTTERMILK (we used yoghurt)
1/2 CUP BUTTER MELTED
1 TEASPOON VANILLA EXTRACT
1 CUP BLUEBERRIES

Preheat the oven to 190°C/375°F/Gas Mark 5

1. Sift the flour, baking powder, bicarbonate of soda and salt into a large bowl.
2. Place the eggs, sugar, yoghurt, butter and vanilla in a second bowl and beat until blended.
3. Add the egg mixture to the flour with the blueberries and fold together gently until just combined.
4. Divide the mixture among muffin cases, placed in a muffin tin.
5. Bake until the edges shrink from the sides of the tin and a toothpick inserted into the muffins comes out clean (around 12-15 minutes).

Then … ? EAT! Yum, yum, yum!

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VARIATIONS

Spiced Banana Yoghurt Muffins: replace the blueberries with 2 diced bananas and 2 teaspoon cinnamon.
Cranberry Nut Yoghurt Muffins: replace the blueberries with 1 cup cranberries and 0.5 cup chopped pecans or walnuts.
Lemon Pear Yoghurt Muffins: replace blueberries with 2 diced pears and the grated zest of 1 lemon.

Never work with children or animals…!

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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!

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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.

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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.

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Better than the “Bake Off” final?

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We know Tuesday nights are for the Great British Bake Off and nothing else, and we know that last Tuesday was none other than the GBBO final, but we had very important work to do, so we had no choice but to make our excuses to Paul “Blue-eyes” Hollywood and the lovely Mary and go and bake up a bit of a storm ourselves. What rebels we are!

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The awesome people (thank you Catherine Conway!) at Unpackaged leant us their equally awesome space (seriously, if you haven’t been there, you need to go!) so that we could hold a special “train the trainer” event for seven of our interested bakers.

Remember we told you about that grant Hackney Council had given us? Well this is where it comes into play. The idea – the dream, if you like – is that we train some of our bakers to be able to teach some of the local parents and children that we work with to be able to bake. We’re not doing it so that our local families stop coming to us for birthday cakes. This is about giving families the skills (and basic equipment/ingredients) to be able to do a fun activity together. Baking: it makes people happy. Eating cake does that too, but eating home made cake is even better.

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We were very lucky to be able to work with Julia Chalkley – a freelance cookery teacher, who teaches all ages, which is just as well really as she was teaching us adults how to teach kids how to bake. And it seemed to work. Julia whipped us all into shape and we managed to produce some very decent batches of very delicious blueberry and yoghurt muffins. But, not only that, we learnt how to structure the time when we run our own baking workshops, and how best to show others, who are unlikely to have ever baked before, how to bake in a way that makes it easy, enjoyable and encourages them to go on to bake again. It was enlightening and we had loads of fun, and our bakers are lovely (even if we do say so ourselves, and even if we may have mentioned it one or two times before)!

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So we missed the Bake Off final, but we can catch it on iPlayer and we still know that Frances rocked it (of course she did – remember those bread sticks made to look like matches?!). And it was so worth it. We met bakers, we ate muffins, we cooked and learnt and are now raring to go with our own baking workshops. The first is at Morningside Children’s Centre in just a couple of weeks. We will, of course, report back here… Wish us luck!