Cinnamon Toast, Jam Tarts & Hat Designs

I decided to attempt a new breakfast treat since one of my daughters refuses to eat pancakes or waffles. I might have finally found something that was a success with both kids and it’s so easy to make 🙂 I made some cinnamon toast, grilled at the end to make the sugar and butter melt and caramelise 🙂 It doesn’t look very impressive, but it tastes good 🙂 It’s also handy having cinnamon sugar made up so you can toss it into other things 🙂

This morning, after bathing their baby again, the girls helped me to bake jam tarts. The recipe was taken from “A Girl Called Jack.” I love how cheap and simple her recipes are 🙂 The girls made the pastry with minimal supervision, greased the trays and filled the tarts with jam. I found it a good bribe to get them to eat their lunch too, as they were even keener to eat them afterwards because they had made them 🙂 I love when you come across baking recipes that you can throw together using whatever you happen to have in the house and they taste as good as something far more time-consuming that you would have had to make a special trip to the shop to bake 🙂

Afterwards, I got the girls to design their own hats 🙂 They just drew out whatever shape they wanted on paper and glued sequins, sparkly paper, bows and glittery thread to them. I made some headbands out of paper strips I cut and I stapled together. I just fitted them to the girls’ heads before attaching the ends 🙂 We cut out the hats and added them to the headbands. With the taller hats, I added a cardboard backing to them to reinforce the paper (Or you could just draw the hats onto cardboard instead if you prefer.) The girls were proud of their creations and I thought they looked surprisingly good for a craft composed of paper scraps 🙂

I’ve spent my quiet time this afternoon writing down ideas for kids’ books and drinking coffee/working my way through brownies. I find Sharon Van Etten the perfect accompaniment to this. I was struggling to write anything I was happy with yesterday, but I plan to just keep returning to it until better ideas come 🙂