Level 2 Chi Kung.
Baking day! Knowing that Daddy would be off on a long bike ride and Sunday would therefore be a mummy-morning, the children started putting in their requests several days in advance. Katie called for baking day and Dash requested gingerbread pancakes with maple syrup for breakfast. Jack, as always, wanted brownies. After the pancakes were tidied away, I got a double mixture of Hugh F-W’s brownies in the oven (it’s really not worth making a single mixture in our house!) then, while Katie licked the bowl and beaters, I started on Nigel’s Slater’s spice biscuits. These are not only yummy (containing 16 pods worth of cardamom) but fulfil the criteria of being easy for Katie to roll out and attack with cookie cutters. I really like to leave the cardamom quite chunky, so that when you bite into a piece you get a strong hit of cardamom but the children hate that, so I ground it fine to keep them happy. Once the mixture was ready, I cut off a third of it and set Katie up with her own floured board and rolling pin. She made a really good job – using the smallest snowflake-shaped cutter to make lots of tiny biscuits.
Once all the baking was done I used the last of the chicken stock to make broccolli soup, then new potatoes, pan fried sea bass and courgette, capsicum and tomato salad for dinner. At which point I belatedly realised that, having spent all afternoon climbing the children’s laundry mountain, I really needed to wash some of my own clothes in order to have something reasonably tidy to wear to the dreaded project management course!