Pick your own
Today is the first day of the summer holidays and my daughter and me went fruit picking in Piercebridge. A whole lot of fun was had by us both. We arrived really early and it was nice and peaceful, probably the only peaceful activity we will get to do over the next 6 weeks!
I say peaceful, my daughter is a little chatterbox which makes her great company, she will really talk about anything. So as we were picking fruit we soon worked out that we probably had more than we could eat in a few days, while the fruit will still be at its best and so I discussed with her the need to not waste it and we began hatching ideas around what we could turn the fruit into to make it last longer.
Pretty good harvest
The best idea was to make some of it into ice cream which we will do once the bucket of the ice cream maker has frozen (that one always catches me out, I can never make ice cream on the day I decide to!). My daughter decided that she wanted to make some strawberry muffins today though. So we did. Using the 4, 4, 4, 2 recipes from this blog post. We added in a cup full of chopped strawberries, which must be dusted with flour first to a) stop them sinking in the muffins/cakes and b) to *try* to stop them leaking and stewing as the cakes bake. Doesn't always work (for me) but it does help.
For icing, I blended a handful of strawberries and added a dash of lemonade and passed it through a sieve to remove the pips. I added it to around 180g of icing sugar, a bit at a time, until I had a really thick paste and that was the topping to our cakes. The taste was unreal! Very, very sweet but undeniably had a strawberry lemonade taste to it. I was pretty proud of the cakes but especially the icing. The little one likes to go crazy on her decorations and even included some unicorn sprinkles on the cakes she decorated!
Our creations will never be considered showstoppers but we do make cakes that taste good, and that's the main thing!
