Learning the Art of Food Fermenting

For a few years now we have been happily using the term "friendly bacteria" and at least have a vague idea that we should be eating more live yoghurt. However, the health of our gut bacteria and its impact on our physical and mental health is becoming a big topic. As scientists gradually begin to unpick the complex relationship between our health and the trillions of microbes that live on and in us, more and more is coming to light about the importance of treating our microbiome with the respect it deserves.

Personally I feel blessed with a relatively happy gut, although I don't take this for granted and do try to treat it well. My husband, in contrast, has struggled with IBS all his life and in the last year has been prescribed antibiotics on a number of occasions, only compounding his issues. Having read the excellent book "The Clever Guts Diet" by Trust Me I'm A Doctor presenter Dr Michael Mosley, he now buys in a cocktail of pre- and pro-biotics in an attempt to help restore his system and improve his condition. Dr Mosley also includes in his book a number of recipes and suggested foods that should be eaten. It is perhaps unsurprising that these include fermented foods.

Historically fermenting food has been done as a way to preserve food, increase the flavour and in some cases to produce alcohol for its recreational benefits. However, these days there is an increasing interest in fermented foods for their benefits to our gut health. It is very much an international past-time and each culture seems to have developed its own range of fermented foods and drinks which these days we embrace with renewed interest as we enjoy foods from different regional cuisines. Where once my first thought of fermented food may have been sauerkraut, these days kimchi would probably be top of my list.

I have dabbled with fermented foods in the past. Sourdough is one example. These days I make yoghurt weekly and a glut in Chinese cabbage led me to a brief foray into kimchi making in the summer. I was, however, of the opinion that I would rather have pickled cabbage on my plate than sauerkraut and, quite frankly, the likes of fermented vegetables and the weird sounding fermented tea kombucha sounded both unappetising and slightly scary.

However, when Turan from Coldsmoking Cookery School offered me the opportunity to sit in on a practice run through of a new fermented food course I was both excited and a little nervous to find out more.

Upon my arrival, Kevan, the course tutor, was unpacking a selection of fermented foods onto the table. It was, as I had feared, a collection of mostly unidentifiable substances in an array of Kilner jars and swing top bottles. I had seen the course outline and I knew we would be expected to taste these as well as make some of them to take home. Still, my mind was open and you never know until you try...

Finding out about Kevan's backgrounds in both microbiology and food foraging is a reassuring way to start a course about fermenting. He is clearly the right man to handhold newbies through the process and avoid accidentally culturing something deadly. Actually, he is very reassuring on this matter and soon convinced me that this was a) highly unlikely to happen and b) likely to create something so "bad" that you wouldn't eat it anyway. In a culture where we reach for the antibacterial spray and bleach in a bid to keep ourselves safe, it can take a little bit of adjusting to get your head around the concept of deliberately growing microbes.

After a brief introduction to the history and purpose of food fermenting we were invited to taste the samples of sauerkraut and kimchi on the table. Probably not my usual go-to option for elevenses but I was here to learn - as much about the flavours as the process. And, I was pleasantly surprised. The red cabbage sauerkraut was a particular stroke of genius and I made a mental note to give that one a try in the autumn when my red cabbages are ready.

It was time to get properly hands on and for the next part of the course we busied ourselves with the simple process of making a batch of sauerkraut and then a batch of kimchi. Soon the room was filled with the delicious smells of fresh vegetables, garlic and ginger and I felt very much back in my comfort zone, shoving stuff into jars.

We continued in well known territory after that by looking at yoghurt making. This traditional fermented food is so familiar and ubiquitous that it is almost a comfort food. Indeed, as I make it every week, I was very much at home with the processes and concepts but nonetheless Kevan managed to give me a tip or too that I'm looking forward to trying. Familiar, as I am, I know full well that in order to create the satisfying Greek-style yoghurt, it needs to be strained and this creates the waste product, whey. Sometimes I just throw my whey down the plughole but I am fully aware that it is a useful product in itself, high in protein and full of all the cultures found in yoghurt. I have used mine in the past to make a high protein chocolate mousse (a favourite with my kids) and I have used it successfully in homemade bread. I was interested to know what Kevan did with his so I asked and then he completely blew my mind by explaining that if you mix it into homemade mayonnaise or salsa you actually increase its shelf life. The cultures in the whey help to keep away potentially harmful microbes. Goodness me! Imagine that adding a waste milk product to a something can actually increase its shelf-life! He also invited me to try some fermented radishes that he had made using whey. Fermented radishes. I don't even like radishes, let alone fermented ones... only it turned out that I did. They had a lovely, completely un-radishy flavour; a mild pickle with a satisfying crunch. Having previously dismissed the idea of growing radishes this year (because no one actually likes them) they are now back on my must-grow list.

By this point I was fully into the whole fermented foods thing and keen to find out more. But then we moved on to that weird sounding fermented tea - kombucha. The unappealing blobby jelly thing (SCOBY) required to kick start the fermenting process did nothing to whet my appetite. A sample awaited for tasting...

Again, mind blown!

How can something made from tea taste so beautifully of apples? Actually, the answer is quite straightforward and Kevan explained the biochemistry, but all the same, it was unexpected and (science aside) magical!

Finally, we moved on to learning about and tasting milk and water kefirs. I was completely unaware of these previously so I had no preconceived ideas. Besides, by this point I had learnt it was best to park my preconceptions as they had been proved wrong over and over again. Whilst milk kefirs are best compared to the likes of Yakult, water kefirs are similar to Fentiman's Botanically Brewed drinks. So delightful to find delicious drinks that are neither overly sweet or alcoholic, with the added benefit of an impressive array of friendly bacteria and yeasts. Yep, I was sold.

I have done a number of food courses now and I am used to going home with the delicious makings from the day ready to please and impress my family. But this was different. Nothing more than a couple of jars of chopped vegetables, yet to be transformed into the wonders of sauerkraut and kimchi and three jars in which lurked starter cultures in the form of alien blobs. Yet, my enthusiasm and excitement was overflowing. Stopping off to buy whole milk and some mineral water (chlorinated tap water is a no no), I came home ready to get fermenting and by the end of the day I had a row of jars bubbling away on my work top and a book on fermented foods on order.

However, the family were less impressed and wholly unconvinced.

By the next morning the bubbly liquid in the jar of water kefir was causing my daughter to question: "What even is that?!" But by the evening the milk kefir was ready and with the addition of some homemade raspberry syrup I was handing out glasses along the lines of yoghurt drink. "That," said my other daughter, "is actually quite nice." The next day the water kefir was ready for tasting and I'm pleased to say that my husband very much enjoyed that. In the meantime, we patiently await more fermented marvels to finish their magic and I look forward to enjoying a whole new part of my kitchen repertoire.

I would highly recommend this course and think it will be an excellent addition to the courses offered at Coldsmoking Cookery. Should you wish to book yourself a place, the next one takes place on 29th June 2018

Making use of Pringles tubes

My daughter has a thing about Pringles. Personally I hold them up there amongst some of the worse highly processed food currently on the market. I don't have an issue with crisps per se but these reformed potato snacks with an alarming list of ingredients that you can't find in your food cupboard make me shudder. And to add to their list of crimes against humanity, the tube they come in cannot be recycled!

For a long time I wouldn't buy Pringles because in my mind they had no place in our home. However, my daughter had other ideas. A friend of mine once passed on a piece of advice that she too had had passed on to her from another mum-friend: "Strict parents have sneaky kids." This piece of advise rattles around in my head permanently and comes to the surface whenever I feel like laying down the law to my children. It's not to say that children shouldn't be disciplined or have boundaries but we have to pick our battles carefully and consider whether our child feels so strongly about said conflict that they will simply continue to do it behind our backs.

And so it was in the Pringles War. Unbeknownst to me, my daughter was buying packs of Pringles and eating them sneakily in her bedroom. This not only brought the hateful Pringles into our house but broke the "no food upstairs" rule and "no snacking between meals" rule too. The only redeeming feature of this was that she was at least using her own money to buy this junk. Fortunately, despite her sneaky snacking, she is not a particularly devious character and hadn't the wit to hide the evidence. Some months later whilst I was in her room trying to track down all the school socks that had gone missing in the past term (laundry baskets are a mystery to her), I discovered an alarmingly vast stash of empty Pringles tubes.

Words were had, negotiations made and in the end it was agreed that I would put Pringles on the household shopping list if it would bring an end to her unsupervised out-of-hours upstairs snacking.

In the meantime, I had a distressingly large volume of Pringles packets to dispose of. I returned to my friend who had offered the sage advise about strict parents to see what could be done. She, you see, is the education officer at the local council recycling factory and she knows all there is to know about the dos and don'ts of recycling in Milton Keynes. Sadly, she confirmed, Pringles tubes can't be recycled because they are a paper outer bonded with an aluminium inner. The best I could do, she told me, was recycle the plastic lid.

At the same time I was wrestling with an annual gardening problem - over enthusiastic seed planting. It is very easy to find enough plant pots in which to sow a whole host of different seeds... but it is another matter entirely to find enough pots and enough space to pot on all the happy seedlings once they have germinated. I had gone particularly overboard with French bean seeds as I had such a pretty selection of seeds at hand and it had looked so nice in the seed tray but now they were all outgrowing that container and it was too early in the season to plant them outside.

It seemed to me that the Pringles tube issue could well solve the French bean issue. Armed with a hacksaw, I sat down to saw the tubes into thirds. Then with a drill I made drainage hole in the bottoms and the lids to make standalone plant pots from each end of the tube.

The middle sections I lined up in a length of old guttering and filled with compost to make another row of bottomless planters. This I suspended from the shelving of my greenhouse through a couple of loops of string, thus increasing my shelving space at the same time.

A few weeks later, of course, I had to throw the improvised Pringles tube flower pots into the black bin bag for landfill but at least I had found one more useful thing to do with them and had saved going out and buying plastic plant pots to do the job.

So should you enjoy the apparently unconnected hobbies of eating Pringles, gardening and saving the planet then might I suggest that you start hoarding your tubes in readiness for the potting on season and making one final useful gesture with that hateful non-recyclable packaging.

Chocolate Making Workshop

On 3rd February, Steve and Cameron from The Chocolate Mill MK will be running their first chocolate making workshop at Coldsmoking Cookery School in Great Linford.

Back in October, they had a practice run-through and I was lucky enough to be one of the guinea-pigs in attendance.

The half-day course started at 10am with an opportunity to taste some different types and qualities of chocolate whilst Steve talked us through the origins, types and prices of chocolate and why they vary. I can think of worse ways to start a day!

We then moved on to the finer points of tempering chocolate. Having fiddled around with making homemade chocolates in the past this has always been where both my skills and confidence tended to give way, leading to chocolates that lacked satisfying snap when broken or, worse still, had unsightly bloom on them. There is no denying it, chocolate is a temperamental beast so it was nice to have a bit of hand-holding through the process and to be introduced to some not scary, simple techniques to use at home with basic equipment.

During the course of the morning we had a go at creating our own personalised chocolate bar, made some chocolate ganache truffle filling and then used that to make hand rolled truffles and filled moulded chocolate. At the same time, as we waited for the chocolate to set, Cameron filled the time with a fun, amusing and perfectly challenging multiple-choice quiz which covered more of the history and background to the chocolate industry.

By the end of the course I felt my kitchen skills had been sufficiently challenged to indicate that I had indeed learnt a good deal. The cookery school was also so thoroughly covered in chocolate that it was undeniable that something significant had taken place!

I would have been happy to have come away with a renewed confidence and inspiration for homemade chocolate making but in addition, I had my very own selection of homemade chocolates to take away to proudly show my family. And if that wasn't enough, we were also provided with a set of course notes to refer to at our leisure when the urge to give it a go at home hit us.

This urge niggled away with me for a couple of months whilst I busied myself with the hectic preserve making season in the run up to Christmas. Then finally, with the last event out of the way, it was time to turn my attention to my own Christmas and to dig out those course notes to make homemade chocolate truffles as gifts.

It had been a few weeks since the course by this point but I felt as if I could remember enough to give it a good stab and I had the notes to guide me when I needed them. So, armed with a supply of chocolate callets and with my old moulds dug out of the back of the cupboard, it was time to give it a go. Over the next few days I dabbled with tempering, fiddled with moulding and experimented with fillings until I had created a small, not quite perfectly formed, selection box ready to give to my mum.

I often think it is funny when I look around at other stallholders at food events and think, I don't know how they can stand to make that over and over again... and then I go home and made yet another batch of jam. Each of us has found our "thing"; that passion that never wears thin and, although repetitive, is somehow perfectly bearable. As much as I enjoy making cupcakes for the family I have no urge to make it my business; doing so might even take the enjoyment out of it. This, I think, is the case for chocolate-making for me too. The course was hugely enjoyable and definitely one of my highlights in 2017, and making the chocolates at Christmas was also a lot of fun and hugely satisfying. I am grateful to Steve and Cameron for adding to kitchen skills and helping me resurrect something I had previously given up on due to dissatisfaction with both the process and the results. I hope it will be something that I return to a few times each year to make something special for friends and family. As an artisan myself, I have never questioned the skill behind the product but spend a couple of hours in the kitchen, with a thermometer and a good deal of patience and you will never question the price of a handmade truffle again!

If you love chocolate, if you love playing around in the kitchen, if you love feeling accomplished, if you love learning new skills, if you love someone and would like to give them extra-special chocolates this Valentine, or if you just love the entertaining energy of the guys from The Chocolate Mill MK, then I would have no hesitation in recommending their course on 3rd February to you.

Putting a Sizzle into Burgers

Recently I have been working with Chris from Sizzlers Burger Shack to produce some relishes for his burgers. Chris is a man passionate about creating the perfect burger and he thinks long and hard about the flavour combinations that go into the different burgers on his menu.

Having already made some onion relish for him, he came back and asked if I could make a jalapeno relish. As you might imagine, this turned out to be somewhat on the hot side... still, some people like that sort of thing so he added it to a special burger on his menu.

A short while later he asked if I could make bacon jam. After a play around and a sample batch, he was happy enough to order 6 catering size jars of the stuff. So off I duly went to the butchers and purchased the necessary 8 kg of bacon required and got busy in the kitchen.  Once the order was complete I was left with a small quantity of the stuff to experiment with. Yes, obviously it is great in a burger but I soon discovered that it works well in an omelette, as a pizza topping and even just stirred into some fried mushrooms. Anywhere that a bit of salty smokiness with a hint of sweetness and heat would enhance the flavour, bacon jam is what you need.

Having made these relishes for Chris and spent time listening to him explaining the finer points of burger menu creation, it seemed only logical that I should actually try one of his burgers. With the local street food scene enjoying something of a boom currently, there are plenty of opportunities to catch Sizzlers and the other local street food vendors at work. I caught up with him at Eat Street at The Buszy and purchased the Route 66.

As an aside, I was reading The Dish magazine the other day and it was doing a special on burgers. On the front cover was a photo of a classic burger. The sort of burger you always imagine and hope you will be served at a fast food restaurant but sadly it fails to deliver. The sort of burger, indeed, that looks like its lettuce has been carefully teased into place with a pair of tweezers. Perhaps the same food photographer was employed for this photo-shoot as for the likes of McDonalds and Burger King.

That is the thing with burgers generally. You get lured in with an attractive photograph and description of a tasty burger but when your order is delivered it is a sad flat thing, lacking colour, soggy in texture and with less fillings than promised. It is such a common phenomenon that you reach a point where you don't even expect the reality to match the marketing. However, I have to say that the Route 66 that sat in my burger box didn't fall into that category. Maybe it was because there had been no photos to order from or maybe it was just a plump, tasty looking burger.

Having passed the visual appeal test, the real proof would be in the eating. And this one delivered on that front too. Bite after bite of meatiness with the complimentary flavours of sauces, bacon and pickles and all of it holding together to the last mouthful rather than disintegrating into a pulpy mass.

So, today, when I found myself with a stall at the same event as Sizzlers it was a no brainer where I would get my lunch. A read of the menu made it hard to decide what to try this time but in the end I went for a State Side and my daughter went for a Double Double. The State Side is a classic burger with lettuce, sauce, mustard, bacon and pickles. I picked it from the description, just as last time, but later I remembered Chris had said something about the Route 66 and the State Side being pretty much the same thing so clearly that classic combination must really appeal to me. The Double Double is a double burger with double cheese and, having been allowed to sample my daughter's lunch, it was super tasty too.

With fast food burger chains and burger vans being so common and often failing to live up to expectation, it is perhaps easy to dismiss Sizzlers as yet another greasy spoon burger van, that will serve up a thin slab of some hard to identify meat with limp salad, over-vinegary sauce in a cotton-wool bun. This is probably particularly true when at a street food event. Here, faced with other vans offering something a little more exotic or novel sounding you might be tempted to overlook the van selling "just burgers", thinking you can pick something similar up at McDonalds at a convenient later date. But that would be a mistake. A burger when done right is a joy to look at and a pleasure to eat and having one that lives up to all your expectations is such a rare moment that is it an opportunity that should not be passed up when presented.

Raspberry & Lemon Celebration Drip Cake

It was my daughter's 13th birthday on Sunday. She is actually a pretty undemanding child when it comes to birthday expectations. However, she does insist that her birthday cake is more spectacular than last year's cake. Oh, and that it contains fresh fruit and no royal icing.

Her 11th birthday cake was a strawberries and cream pinata cake - concealing a hidden stash of fresh strawberries in the middle.

Her 12th birthday cake was some ridiculous strawberry layer cake affair, stacked with meringues, chocolate bark, fruit and shortbread biscuits.

So what next?

With the soft fruit season a couple of weeks earlier that usual this year, I was pretty sure the homegrown strawberries would be over before her birthday but that the raspberries would still be in abundance so I started working on that as a theme. I also asked Rebecca from the Blue Whisk Bakery if she had any ideas for spectacular cakes that didn't involve royal icing and she suggested I looked up "drip cakes" for inspiration as they were tall and could be stacked up with anything on top. As an aside, she had also asked me if I could make her some raspberry curd for a cake. I'd never made raspberry curd before but it sounded tasty and like something I might include in my daughter's cake.

A bit of web searching later and I was beginning to piece together an idea, taking inspiration from that cake recipe and this icing recipe until I committed myself to a plan by sketching it on a napkin as I talked through it with my daughter.

The preparation for the cake making started a few days before with the making of a fresh batch of lemon curd. This is something we enjoy in yoghurt and rice-pudding so I always have a batch on the go. Then I fiddled with the recipe and tried raspberry curd. I had always assumed that my homemade raspberry jam was the best thing ever... but it turns out it is actually raspberry curd. Tasting like a beautifully smooth raspberry ice-cream, it was hard not to just spoon it straight into my mouth. Another get ahead job was to slice a lemon and boil it up in some sugar syrup for a while to create some candied lemons for decoration. Then the last bit of prep was to puree some raspberries. I normally puree raspberries before making them into jam as many people prefer their jam without the seeds so this is something I do all the time and I have a useful kitchen gadget for it. However, it can easily be done by mashing up fresh raspberries then working them through a sieve.

Then it was a case of making the cakes - my normal lemon layer cake and a Victoria sandwich cake, adapted to be raspberry flavoured instead of vanilla using some of my raspberry puree.

For my birthday my mum had given me a handy devise for slicing a cake horizontally. It's not something I would have bought for myself but it has actually proved useful on occasions. So, the sandwich tin cakes were sliced in half to make a total of eight layers.

These I stacked up with alternate layers of lemon curd and raspberry curd.

 Once stacked, I then made a batch of butter icing and flavoured that with more raspberry puree to create something with an impressive colour and flavour with no need for artificial augmentation.

After spreading this around the cake, I put the cake in the fridge to chill whilst I made the white chocolate and lemon gauche.

Whilst waiting for that to reach the right dripping consistency, I popped outside for some fresh fruit and a collection of edible flowers to put on top.

I didn't expect people to eat the flowers but it is handy to know they they weren't going to transfer any unpleasant flavours or poisons to the top of the cake. On this occasion I used calendula, nasturtiums, marigolds, borage and gherkin flowers to match my colour scheme. Then I added the soft fruit - raspberries (of course), some strawberries dipped in white chocolate, redcurrants, jostaberries and gooseberries.

Given that I had never made a drip cake before and that decorative cake making isn't really my forte, I was pretty pleased with what I had achieved and my daughter was super excited to see it when she came back in from her dance lesson. Personally I think the most important part of any cake is its flavour and I particularly hate cutting into a highly-decorated cake to find a dull, over-processed sponge cake beneath. This cake, I was sure, was going to eat well.

Later, after a tasty meal, with the family assembled, we lit the candles, sung the song and cut the cake. Despite thin slices, each slice was of epic proportion and difficult to finish but it was undeniably raspberry and lemon flavoured and my daughter was satisfied that I had indeed produced a cake more spectacular than last year's.

Raspberry & Lemon Drip Cake

For the lemon cake

225g soft margarine
225g caster sugar
4 medium eggs
1 lemon - zest and juice
225g self-raising flour
1 teaspoon baking powder
Pinch of salt

For the raspberry cake

225g soften butter
225g caster sugar
4 medium eggs
3 tablespoons raspberry puree
225g self-raising flour
Pinch of salt

For the raspberry buttercream

350g soften butter
600g icing sugar
3 tablespoons raspberry puree

For the white chocolate and lemon gauche

150 white chocolate
100g lemon curd

You will also need lemon curd, raspberry curd and decorations for the top.

Preheat oven to 180°C, gas 4 and grease and line two 20cm circular sandwich cake tins. Both the lemon and raspberry cakes can be made in the same way. Cream together the fat with the sugar then stir in the eggs, one at a time. Add the fruit component and stir then add the flour and salt (and raising agent) and stir until well combined and smooth. Spoon the batter equally between the two cake tins and level off. Bake for 20 minutes until springy to the touch and text with a skewer. Cool in the tin for 5 minutes then remove onto a wire rack to cool completely.

Once cooled, cut the cakes horizontally so that there are a total of 8 slices of cake. Choose a suitable presentation plate and place the first layer of cake on it. Spoon curd onto the cake and spread evenly over it. Next place a layer of the other flavour of cake on top and spoon the other curd flavour onto that. Continue, alternating the flavours, until the last layer of cake is placed on top.

Use the butter icing to completely coat the cake - sides and top. Use a straight sided spatula to smooth out the icing. Place the cake in the fridge to cool. Next melt the white chocolate. You might like to dip some fruit into the white chocolate at this stage. Once slightly cooled, stir in the lemon curd then leave to cool until it is a suitable consistency for dripping. Spoon into a piping bag and carefully pipe on the drips then cover the top with a layer of the gauche and level off. Whilst the gauche is still slightly soft, push your decorative items into it or use blobs of leftover butter icing or gauche to act like glue.

Get Growing this Easter

I realised recently that I have been growing plants for 30 years now. Having said that, some of you may now imagine me to be a woman in her "mature" years but in fact I started seriously growing plants at the age of 12. I can't really remember what started it - maybe a friend giving me a "baby" from her spider plant - but with the aid of a good book on house plants, my bedroom very quickly started to resemble a jungle. It was a rewarding hobby, perhaps a substitute for not being allowed a pet, and something I was able to get on with without adult assistance and within the realms of my pocket money.

These days I don't deliberately grow houseplants. Not that you would be able to tell if you came to my house as every available windowsill has plants on it and I recently went out to buy vertical shelving units to make use of the big window space offered by my patio doors. All the plants, however, are edible and are either destined for the garden when the weather warms up or the result of me looking at a kitchen ingredient and wondering: what would happen if I planted that? So currently I have a turmeric plant, a lemongrass plant, root ginger, a sweet potato and a variety of citrus plant that grew from a pip my daughter stuck in a pot about eight years ago.

When growing my spider plants, propagating my begonias and sowing new seedlings I never imagined that it would led to a life-long love of growing and to me growing vast quantities of fruit and vegetables. But once you have success at growing plants it is hard to not continue with it. Even back then when edibles were not my thing, I used to enjoy making mini dessert islands by placing a carrot top on a saucer and watching the top regrow. My friend and I successfully grew avocado plants from stones given to us by her grandma and I even managed to regrow a pineapple top into a healthy houseplant, although it never did bare the mini fruit shown in my handbook.

My own children have grown up with their parents growing the household fruit and vegetables so in some ways they take it for granted and think it normal. They don't really realise that their classmates at school probably couldn't identify vegetable plants from just their leaves and whilst girls are getting hysterical about a wasp my two will calmly know it is only a hoverfly. There is, however, a wonder to teaching children how to grow plants and it is easy to get started. Try the carrot top - that really is simplicity on a plate. Potatoes that have already sprouted are good to throw into a bag of compost too. A clove of garlic will regrow happily into a whole new bulb. More challenging are the likes of pineapple tops, root ginger, monkey nuts, citrus pips and avocado but they are all possible and there is nothing to lose by giving them a go.

Kids do get some opportunities to grow a few things at school and most will experience seeing the germination of a runner bean pressed against the inside of a jam jar with a wad of damp cotton wool. They will also, undoubtedly, grow cress and experience the taste of egg and cress sandwiches. Cress is particularly easy because it is only grown to the seedling stage and then harvested so it only takes a few days and doesn't require potting on.

So with growing cress in mind, here is a lovely activity to do during the Easter holidays that will give your kids a taste of growing. Personally I think growing is fun in itself but the creation of an egg character adds to the enjoyment.

Making a Cress Egg Head

You will need

An empty and clean egg shell (plus spares!)

A toilet roll

Cotton wool

Cress seeds

Felt tipped pens

Googly eyes

Foam/paper hands and feet

Double-sided sticky tape or sticky dots or glue

1) Cut the toilet roll to make a ring shape about 3 cm tall and colour it in to make a body.

2) Stick on the foam or paper hands and feet with double-sided tape, dots or glue.

3) Gently stick the googly eyes carefully onto the eggshell (or draw them on) and draw on the rest of the face. Place the egg head onto its body (note: if your egg slips through the ring place a piece of scrunched up tissue paper in the ring for the egg to rest on).

4) Moisten the cotton wool and place it inside the egg shell then sprinkle on cress seeds.

5) Place on the windowsill and water every day until the cress is ready to eat then give your egg character a hair cut and enjoy your cress in a sandwich or salad.

Teeny tiny cheesecakes

So when is is acceptable to eat four cheesecakes for dessert?

When they are the size of an ice-cube.

There I was absently scrolling through my Instagram feed this morning when I came across the idea for mini cheesecakes made in ice-cube trays. It was one of those moment when I just knew I had to give them ago and, luckily, I happened to have all the required ingredients to hand so by dinner time we were tucking in to the daintiest little desserts you could imagine. Your life is not complete unless you try these!

Mini Cheesecakes (makes 1 tray's worth)

Ice-cube trays vary in size considerably so the size and quantity of your cheesecakes will be dependent on your tray. I would recommend the biggest you have so they are less fiddly to make.

Jam - flavour of your choosing
100g mascarpone cheese
140g cream cheese
70g icing sugar
1/2 tsp vanilla extract or vanilla bean paste
40g melted butter
50g granola
50g digestive biscuits

Cover the bottom of each ice-cube hole with a little jam then place in the freezer whilst you prepare the filling. Mix together the mascarpone, cream cheese, sugar and vanilla. Spoon this mixture into a sandwich bag and cut off the corner so you can use it like an piping bag. Pipe the filling into each cube hole until it is three quarters full. Smooth out with a teaspoon or a wet finger. Place in the freezer for half an hour. In the meantime, blitz the biscuits and granola in a food processor until crumbed then mix with the melted butter. Remove the ice cube tray from the freezer and spread the biscuit mixture over it and lightly press into each hole. Return to the freezer for at least an hour. Remove from the freezer and carefully pop each cheesecake out of the tray. I found that a plastic knife gently pushed down the edge of each cube helped to extract them. Stand each cake on its biscuit base and put in the fridge to thaw out until required.