Possibly the best slice in the World.

Do you have a favourite slice that you make? I discovered this one a few months ago and it's been a big favourite ever since. Not only is it extremely yummy, but it's flexible (you can include different things each time depending what you have in your cupboards) and it's super quick and easy to make (always a bonus in this house!) Want the recipe? Here it is:

Sweetened Condensed Milk Slice

1 packet (250g) super wine/digestive/plain/malt biscuits

110g butter, melted

1 1/2 cups chocolate pieces/chips or buttons

1 1/4 cups dried cranberries

1 1/4 cups walnuts

1 can sweetened condensed milk (approx 400g)

1. Preheat your oven to 180 degrees. Put your biscuits through a food processor until they resemble fine crumbs (or pop them in a bag and crush them with a rolling pin).
2. Pour your melted butter into the biscuit crumbs and give them another whizz in the food processor (or stir the butter through the crumbs in a bowl.)
3. Pour the butter/biscuit mix into a slice tin (around 30x25cm is a good size) and press them down with a spatula or the back of a spoon.
4. Pop your chocolate, cranberries and walnuts into the food processor (don't worry about cleaning it in between making the biscuit base and this part) and give them a whizz to break down the pieces (or do the bag and rolling pin thing again).
5. Sprinkle the chocolate mix over the top of the biscuit base evenly.
6. Drizzle the sweetened condensed milk all over the top of the fruit/nut/chocolate mix. Bake it for 25 minutes.
7. Leave it to cool then cut into slices.
8. Watch it disappear!

You can adjust this recipe using your own ingredients. Substitute dark chocolate for milk or white chocolate (the white would make it too sweet though I think!). Swap the cranberries out for any other dried fruit or even coconut and substitute the nuts out for any other nut you like or leave them out and add more fruit instead.

RWC supporters dresses for girls tutorial

You may have noticed... New Zealand has gone a little RWC mad. There are seas of plastic flags covering every available surface in Auckland and the souvenirs are flying out of shops as everyone gears up for the first game tomorrow. Our girls had a RWC mufti day at school today. The idea was that you came dressed in your team's colours. M chose England and E chose the All Blacks.

In the interests of trying something that I've been meaning to try for a long time (and in saving myself a lot of money), I decided to make them little dresses to wear. These are super simple to make but you will need a little patience when making the freezer paper stencils but trust me, it's all worth it.

What you will need is:

This gorgeous free dress pattern from Retromummy.

Fabric in your team's colour (get the amount you need from the pattern. I just used calico because I had some at home)

Contrasting bias binding

matching thread, scissors, pins etc

Freezer Paper (you can buy this from most quilting shops and you only need enough to make your design)

Exacto (craft) knife and board or small sharp scissors

Fabric paint (If your team logo has lots of colours, I'd recommend getting a bottle of acrylic fabric painting medium. It will turn your acrylic paints into fabric paint and makes things a lot cheaper.)

Paint brush (ideally a stippling brush but you can use a make up sponge or other kind of brush. Whatever you have)

An iron

A sewing machine

England and New Zealand battle it out on the pitch

First things first. Cut your two pieces of fabric out from the pattern to the size you want. Grab one of the pieces and pop it on your ironing board. Find an image online that will represent your team and print it out so that it fills a page of A4 paper. Cut roughly around the edges and tape the image on the non waxy side of the freezer paper. Using an exacto knife (or small sharp scissors) cut out your stencil. Don't panic if you cut through small lines. The freezer paper is going to be ironed on to your fabric and you won't notice the break in the join if you iron it on carefully. Keep it simple. Don't try to do too much fiddly stuff if your image is complicated. As long as you get the rough outline, little jaggedy bits on leaves etc aren't going to be missed and you'll save yourself a lot of trouble.



Once it's all cut out, remove the printed piece of paper and put the freezer paper stencil on your fabric where you want the design (make sure the waxy side is next to the fabric). Iron it in place making sure that you iron it all on firmly and there are no gaps between the freezer paper and fabric. Turn your iron off and take the fabric and stencil over to a table. Pop the fabric on top of several sheets of newspaper and paint over your stencil in your chosen colours. A large stippling brush works best but you could use any brush or even a make up sponge if you haven't got a stippling brush.  If you are painting white onto black fabric, you are going to need 3 or 4 coats of paint and you can use a hairdryer to hurry things along a bit if you need it to dry quickly in between coats.



Now this is the important thing, put it somewhere inside to dry and leave it there until it's completely dry. Don't do what I did and put it outside to dry. The wind will inevitably kick up the edges of your dress and splatter paint everywhere. You should also avoid lifting the edges of the freezer paper before the paint is dry, because you are so impatient to see how it's going to turn out and then realise that you should add another coat of paint but the bit you lifted up isn't very sticky anymore and the paint seeps under it and ruins your design (ask me how I know that?).

Once it's all dry, peel off the freezer paper and use Retro Mummy's instructions to make up the dress. You can of course use the freezer paper method on any clothing. You could go and buy a t-shirt or simple dress and then there's no sewing at all. Just lots of messy painting fun!



Oh and if you really don't like rugby, you could use this method to put any stencil design on your daughter's dress or your son's t-shirt. There are lots of other tutes out there for freezer paper stencilling. Just google them and you'll get loads of ideas. Have fun!

An interruption to our service.

Sorry kids but its been suggested by a very nice media person that I remove knitted Dan from my blog in case his image gets 'borrowed' before time without my permission. He'll be back in service on 10th September.

A little teaser

I'll reveal more soon but in the meantime, here's a clue

A Zooish kind of day

Wasn't it a beautiful day in Auckland yesterday? Pure blue skies and just the right amount of winter warmth in the sunlight. Miss M had a party to go to and Richard needed to do some work so E and I hung at out home. We spent the morning building a zoo for her toy animals on the deck.

Who needs fences when you have chalk and imagination?

The hippo enclosure. Check out those teeth!

The aquarium got a little crowded, especially when the penquins joined in

Grandma doll took ticket office duty. She needed a bit of a hand from E with
 the stamping of the tickets (and then the ticket office got a good stamping too).

The baby zebra learned to climb trees. Very talented.

It was so lovely to have some one on one time with E. She started school 2 weeks ago and it already seems like she has grown up so much. She ran all the way to her classroom this morning and got stuck in practicing writing her letters as soon as we arrived. It's so wonderful to see her passion for learning. Long may it last! I have some one on one time with M today. She's home sick with a virus that seems to have most of her school in its grips. Poor love is sneezing and coughing away on the couch. Fingers crossed she's better soon. Hope you had a lovely weekend. What did you do?

Not Stupid

Sometimes I worry that our cats are a few sandwiches short of a picnic.

Hmm. It said 'one size fits all' on the box...

Kitty Yoga

Other times, I know that they are pretty smart.

Kitty heat-hogger

Just try and take me out of here. I dare you.

Hope you are managing to keep warm too!

Miss E's Mermaid Party - The games and activities

With 15 girls at a 3 hour birthday party, I was in need of easy, enjoyable and fairly time consuming activities to keep the girls entertained. Miss M (my 7 year old) invited 2 of her friends (who had little sisters as guests at the party) to come along and I put them in charge of leading the games and crafts. It made Miss M feel very important and she loved guiding the younger ones. It also left me with a lot more time to concentrate on helping Miss E to greet the arriving guests.

 We had a long low table that our neighbour lent to us and Mr Cotton Kiwi came up with the idea of balancing one of my market trestle tables on sturdy boxes to make a table the same height. We pushed them together and put a big cloth over both and then I sent my girls on a big cushion hunt around the house. It's amazing how many cushions you can rustle up in a party crisis! Miss M and her friends used a corner of the table and a chair to run a 'Mermaid Makeover' salon for guests when they arrived. We had pink sparkly sticky gems for earrings, some silver glitter hairspray and a treasure chest of jewels, should the mermaid feel the need to accessorise.

 Another corner of the table had a crown decorating area. I bought sparkly craft foam from The Warehouse (New Zealand's version of Walmart) and cut it into crown shapes. I punched holes in the sides and threaded elastic through. The girls had a combination of mermaid stickers, craft foam sea creature shapes and gold stars and glue to decorate their crown (everything came from the Warehouse or the $2 shop).

It was quite tricky making decisions on the best combination of items for your crown.

 I made sure every child had their name written on the back of their crown and the first party game we played was a relay race with 2 teams. The girls had to crawl (mermaid swimming style) across the floor before climbing onto the rock (our ottoman), finding their crown, putting it on their head and 'swimming' back to tag the next team member. I have to say that it was a bit of a disaster as the vast majority of the kids had no idea about how to be in a team or about relay races. It hadn't occured to me that pre-school kids wouldn't have any experience of this kind of race. I think they had fun anyway and all of them got some lollies from the jar as a prize.

Another part of the craft table was a mermaid peg doll making station. I used this tutorial as the basis of the dolls but cut up pieces of yellow fleece into strips to use as the hair instead of yarn. I also painted the tail end of the pegs green in readyness for the party as I knew paint would be a disaster. The craft foam and fleece stuck on pretty well with a Uhu glue stick so there was no need for adult supervision at all. They used felt tip pens for the faces.

We played lots of other games including 'Mermaid, Mermaid, Fish' (Duck duck goose);, Mermaid statues and a hilarious game that involved popping balloons to get a challenge out and then completing the challenge. Again, not ideal for all 5 year olds as about 4 of the kids were frightened of the balloons popping. The others loved it though. I got my ideas for party games from here.

There was lots of dancing and an hours worth of enterainment from the lovely Mermaid entertainer.

We had afternoon tea about 40 minutes before the end of the party and then I just let the kids loose with balloons and a bunch of mermaid dolls and they entertained themselves for the last 20 minutes or so.

Hope you get some ideas from these posts!