Astronaut food - A Relish Review

When dad came back from Vegas he had heaps of awesome surprises for us, even some Astronaut Ice Cream.  We decided that today was the perfect day to try our ice-cream as an after school snack.

It was weird to eat.  It was dry and powdery.  When the pieces of ice-cream melted on your tongue it actually tasted like neapolitan ice-cream.  The initial taste was delicious.  The taste a few seconds later wasn't so nice.  In fact the taste left in your mouth was like the taste you have in your mouth in the morning when you have a giant glass of milk before bed and then forget to brush your teeth.  

It was fun to eat but I don't think it is enough for me to want to eat more.

Love AJ and Milla

Milla's Massive Haul

I know that AJ has just told you all about his fun day at the Cadbury Easter Egg Hunt yesterday and how we were lucky enough to be given free tickets to join in the fun of the chocolatey day.  Now it is time for me to tell you about the fun that I had and show you some of my favourite photos from the day.  

We all screamed in excitement, waiting for the start.

Running for more more eggs

Super happy about my haul

Thanks for an awesome day Cadbury

I needed to stop for a rest on the way back to the car 

(Even after sharing dozens of eggs with mum and dad, and munching on them the entire way home, there were still 128 Easter Eggs left in my bucket when I got home!

Thanks for an awesome day Cadbury, and congratulations on raising so much money to support the Royal Children's Hospital.

Love Princess George

PS - Just a reminder that we were lucky enough to get free tickets to this event from Cadbury but all of the smiles in the photos show just how awesome the day really was.

Chocolate Carnage

Guess what happens when the day that mum decides to be Easter bunny and go shopping for Easter eggs and then hides said eggs from us in her study and this day happens to be a freaky hot day? Chocolate carnage.

Manky melted chocolate deliciousness :-)

As a consequence, dad is forced to do a second Easter egg shop. Of course when mum said Easter eggs, she really meant a couple of decent sized eggs or rabbits, ones that the famed Easter Bunny could deliver to the ends of our beds when we are sleeping. Naturally, dad simply heard Easter eggs so that is what he bought - communication fail!

As a result, we will now have eleventy billion hunting eggs to find on Sunday, as well as munching on the formerly melted now somewhat squished-out-of-shape deliciousness!

Being on chocolate day,
Love AJ and Milla

Surprise delivery

A quiet Friday afternoon, just sitting around relaxing (read: mindlessly watching whatever was on tv!) when the doorbell rings. We answer it to find it was a delivery for mum in a big box marked fragile. We had no idea what was going to be in it. Even mum had no idea what it was going to be, she couldn't remember any recent online purchases. Together we all opened it and found the most delicious surprise ever...

Mum quickly snuck the envelope that came with the delivery away so we still don't know where it came from, perhaps some secret admirer, who knows. Who cares, as long as we get to share the yum!

Now if only mum would let us open the package and eat the chocolate instead of dinner!
Love AJ and Milla

The Christmas Crazy Begins

It seems that the Christmas Crazy has begun.  We have our first Christmas get-together tomorrow and so I had to get busy making a treat to share with our friends.  I wanted to make something that looked good, tasted great but was super quick and easy to make.  I have seen about a billion different variations of mini-plum puddings, do you like what I came up with?

Now normally I hate plum puddings but these are delicious.

Mini Plum Puddings (that actually taste great!)

The other good thing about making these is that all of the ingredients are delicious - Chocolate Royales, Jaffas and Mint Leaves.  Even the splodge of icing tastes OK.

I wonder what Christmassy treat I will make next?
Love Princess George

Sundays in my City #16 - Crazy Cake

I know I promised to get out and about this weekend and take real photos but I have already posted many of the photos.  Luckily after the Soccer Goal of the Year (OK, her only soccer goal), we promised Milla that her and a friend could do something fun and they decided to make a cake.  I could have taken photos of the baking but that would have shown the devastation of 3 kids baking, instead I took heaps of photos of the eating.

Ready for frosting

He doesn't want to wait!

The boy has a taste...

The girl is waiting for her slice... 

Apparently this shows they like the cake.

And perhaps this one suggests a little too much food colouring!

If you want to make this delicious cake too, this is the recipe base we used, adding food colouring instead of cocoa and choc chips.  It is super easy to make (3 kids under 10 did all of the work!), delicious and looks pretty spectacular too!

If you want to join in the fun of Sundays in my City too, click on over to Unknown Mami.

Happy to have Homework?

Now it isn't often that I am happy to have homework, or that I even want to do homework but today it was different.  I had to choose my own topic and it was the best topic ever - AJ's Awesome Triple Layer Cake.

As you can see, my cake is pretty awesome so I thought I would share it with you.

Preparation

• wash your hands
• check and make sure you have all the ingredients
• check and make sure you have all the equipment
• make sure you have permission

Equipment

• mixing bowl
• wooden spoon
• table spoon
• cup
• small sized pan
• medium sized pan
• large sized pan

Ingredients

6 dessert spoons of butter (melted)

2 cups of sugar

2 cups of self raising flour

4 table spoons of cocoa

4 eggs

1 cup of milk

3 drops of vanilla essence/extract

1 cup of choc chips

1/4 cup of cocoa

Recipe

1. Preheat the oven to 180c.
2. Put the sugar and flour into the bowl.
3. Break eggs on top and mix.
4. Pour the melted butter, milk and vanilla into the cake.
5. Beat all ingredients together for 3 minutes.
6. Pour 1/3 of mixture into the medium sized lined cake pan.
7. Put cocoa into the rest of the mixture and mix well.
8. Pour 1/2 of the chocolate mixture into the biggest pan.
9. Add chocolate chips to the rest of the chocolate mixture and stir.
10. Pour the rest into the smallest pan.
11. Place in the oven and pan for 45 minutes or until cooked.
12. Remove from the oven and cool in pan for 5 minutes.
13. Ice with chocolate icing.

Construction

• Get the biggest layer and cover the top and sides with icing.
• Place the medium size cake on top and then put icing on it.
• Then place the smallest cake on top and put the icing on.

Safety

• Get help to get the cake in and out of the oven.
• Get help to cut the cake.

Clean Up

• Wash the dishes.
• Put everything away.

Eat and enjoy - this cake is totally AWESOME!

Baking with Colour

Last night one of my best friends came here for a sleep over.  Her dad came to pick her up in the morning but we convinced him to let her stay because we had really important things to do.  Luckily he said yes and to celebrate, we made cookies.  The best thing about making cookies is eating them.  The second best thing about making them is that as they are cooking, we get more time to play - the perfect delaying tactic!

We used one of my favourite cookie recipes - 100s of biscuits.  The recipe literally makes hundreds of biscuits if you don't eat all of the dough!  I think we ate more than we cooked.  Because the mixture makes so many, we all got to choose our own variations.  AJ and mum made choc-chip cookies.  We would have taken photos of them if they weren't devoured in 3.2 seconds.

We decided that we wanted plain biscuits but wanted to add some variety.  When I say variety, what I really mean is COLOUR.  How awesome do they look?

They are pretty delicious too!
Love Princess George

Mother's Day Treat

Well normally for Mother's Day, AJ and I would want to make breakfast in bed for mum but since mum is pretty fussy about what she has for breakfast and doesn't really like us cooking bacon and eggs on our own, we usually end up going out somewhere nice for brunch.  We really wanted to do that today but we couldn't because mum and dad weren't here, they had a wedding to go to yesterday that was really far away so they had a sleepover instead of driving all the way home.

We were lucky, we had a chance to spend the weekend hanging out with Grandma until mum and dad got home this afternoon.  Then it was time to get busy in the kitchen and make a special treat for mum, and for all of us too.

I made a chocolate torte from a box, I didn't have enough chocolate to make it from scratch.  To be honest, it was delicious and it tasted like it was made from scratch anyway.

Happy Mother's Day mum, I love you
Love Princess George xo

Parents Can Be Tricky Folks

Now I don't know about anyone else's parents but I just need to let you know that my parents are pretty darn tricky.  I know Milla thinks that mum and dad are pretty tricky, she tells people about when we were tricked into going shopping when we were in Niagara.

The latest thing I have worked out that they trick us in to doing is eating all of our dinner.  Now realistically we do eat lots of healthy food but every now and then we like to complain that we don't like our food or that we just aren't hungry.  We are never told to sit down and eat all our dinner, we are barely ever bribed with the possibility of dessert but somehow we eat pretty much everything, including the healthy stuff that kids aren't supposed to like.

When I think about it, I can work out just how we have been tricked into being good eaters...  The first mistake I made was when I was just a little kid in prep and my teacher told me that our taste buds regenerate in about a week.  Now in parent-speak, that just means that food that we really didn't like last week was when we had last weeks taste buds, with new taste buds this week perhaps we will like it so we have to try the food we don't like - again.  Now it isn't like we can just nibble at the edge of the food and say 'See, I still don't like it'.  In our house trying food is 6 real spoonfuls and that is almost a full serving.  I guess I have worked out that it is just easier to eat most of the food and only complain when I really don't like something, like ripe pears.  It seems to be a fairly decent compromise, I still get curry and stuff that I like most of the time and there are still plenty of chances to eat out when no-one wants to cook.

Now it seems that there is a new trick in play.  Take last weekend for example, no-one wanted to cook dinner so out we went.  There are heaps of great places around here to go and this time we went to a restaurant we hadn't visited before and ordered way too much food.  Next thing I know, mum is asking me if I wanted to see if I could eat the longest noodle in the bowl?  Now I am never going to say no to a challenge that sounds like fun so this is what happened...

Of course Milla didn't want to miss out on the action so she was fed some noodles too!

Before you know it, we had pretty much eaten the entire bowl of noodles!


How is that  for tricky parenting - getting us to eat the rest of our noodles without complaining and having fun at the same time?  The noodles were pretty awesome too :-)
Love AJ Pickle

Easter

I'm still not sure if the Easter Bunny is real or not so last night, as mum was tucking me in and saying good night, I asked if she thought the Easter Bunny would leave some footprints for us again.

Whoever the Easter Bunny is, they did leave footprints all over the dining table!  AJ pointed out that they weren't real rabbit footprints but I don't care, they look pretty cool and they also come with about a bazillion Easter eggs that I keep finding in the strangest of places!


I hope you have a wonderful chocolatey Easter too,
Love Princess George






PS - do you like the place name cards that I made for everyone for our special Easter feast last night?

Found Her!

So mama has been really really busy but that isn't always a bad thing, sometimes when she is super busy she does crazy things, like she did last night.  Apparently she couldn't sleep so she got up in the middle of the night and made some choc-chip biscuits.

I think she must be a little bit too tired to think now because she said YES when I asked if I could have one for breakfast before she ran out the door on another crazy adventure to the Digital Parents Conference!

Love Princess George

Industrial Cooking

Why oh why does AJ need to wear ear muffs when he is cooking?  

Oh well, I really shouldn’t complain, I should just enjoy the cookies!

Love Princess George

Not-Quite-Normal in Boston

After a late night out at the ice hockey, we decided to take easy this morning.  Instead of getting up early and heading out, we decided to head downstairs to the pool.  We were only planning of spending a few minutes in the pool we ended up spending a few hours swimming in the pool.

 It was great fun but it turns out that I may have spent a few too many hours in the pool.  By the time we got out of the pool my eyes were hurting.  By the time we headed out into the sunshine my eyes were watering.  We were on our way to lunch but had to stop because I couldn't see.

Instead of going straight to lunch we had find a pharmacy to get some drops for my eyes so that I could see again.  Hooray for the iPad and being able to find a pharmacy without having to walk all over Beacon Hill for hours on end!

Finally I was able to see again and we headed out for lunch.  The place we went to for lunch is apparently pretty famous, but I have never heard of it before, have you?

Anyway, I haven't heard of the place before but the food was pretty good.

  

We thought that when we were in the mood for famous things we should try some food that was famous in Boston - Boston Cream Pie.  Well it turns out that Boston Cream Pie is really only cake with lots of cream in it and some pretend chocolate stuff on top.  It was OK but I don't think it was so great that is should be famous.  I think I would prefer to eat a piece of chocolate cake instead.  Either way, at least now I am feeling better and have had a big lunch, I am ready to get back out there and explore Boston for one more afternoon.

Love Princess George

Highlight of the day

So of all the cool things we did in Cleveland, do you know what my favourite part of the day was?  It was when we wandered through the gardens on the way to the waterfront.  Now we have walked through about a billion gardens in our time but this one was extra good - it was an edible garden!

Milla wandered through the garden too

 I really wanted to eat a carrot but they weren't big enough to pick.  Instead I picked myself a radish.

Love at first bite?

I have never eaten a radish before.  I am not too sure I actually like eating radish but I loved being able to pick and eat my own food!

Love AJ Pickle

Life in Westlake

I think that I could get used to living in Westlake, there are heaps of places to play.  There is plenty of space in the yard to kick or throw a footy and just up the road there is a lake and some woods to do some serious exploring.  

It didn't have time to do heaps of exploring, I had to get back to the McNamara's to get ready for the cook up - I was in charge of cooking the hot dogs over the fire pit.  

I was also the head marshmallow toaster.  I briefly handed over the title of head marshmallow toaster to Tony so that he could make some s'mores for me.  Don't tell Tony, but I have to admit that I tasted the s'mores - marshmallows and chocolate smooshed between some crackers but wasn't a huge fan so I gave mine to mum to munch on.  I was pretty glad that most people at the party wanted real food I and went back to toasting and eating every marshmallow in sight.

I like hanging out around here.  I hope I get more time to explore properly before we take off to another part of the country.
Love AJ Pickle

The Day before the Big Day

In one more sleep Marah and Edrick get married (again) and we get to have a gigantic party.  That means that today we have to make sure everything is ready for the big day.  I had the job of being the official helper-outer-er and photographer.  There were flowers to be arranged... food to be prepared... words of wisdom to be written... and hair to be cut.  Busy, busy, busy!

I can't wait until tomorrow.  I think that I am almost as excited as Marah and Edrick!
Love Princess George

Question Time

Why is it that whenever we want to play with our (second) cousins, who live about half an hour away from where we live, we have to drive all the way to Yarrawonga?

I really wish we had more time to play with our cousins more often.

Love Princess George

mmm, Seafood!

Did you know that I am the only person in my family adventurous enough to eat seafood? Well it is true. In fact I am such an adventurous eater that I am prepared to catch my own food and eat it straight from the lake.

We found some muscles and I thought I would give it a go.

Should I try some more?

Kind of tasty!

eeew, that's disgusting!

I wonder what tasty treats I can find to eat next, something from the island, or some left over treats from Christmas?

Love Princess George

An Early Christmas

We know that it is only the middle of December and that there is almost 2 weeks until it is Christmas for real but we want to be able to celebrate with everyone so we are starting early. Aunty Sharn, Dave and Billy are about to head off to England to introduce Billy to the rest of the world so we had our Christmas at Adam and Melati's house today and it was awesome.

There was heaps of yummy food, lots of sweet treats, my favourite uncle and of course presents.

I think AJ likes his present, what do you think?

Merry early Christmas,

Love Princess George