You’ve probably all heard of the term ‘Parent Bloggers’, but have you ever taken the time to look closer into the circle of parents writing daily in the blogosphere? You will find some amazing posts covering all kinds of parenting and family related topics. A wide and varied selection of blogs – personal, funny, touching, professional, reviews, crafty, recipes… whatever your taste, there will definitely be a blog that you will come to love following.
Here Flying Start takes a look at a few recent Easter recipe and craft posts featured on a selection of parenting blogs.
Easter Bakes
On www.plus2point4.co.uk Aly and the kids have been busy making Easter bakes. Not one, two but recipes for you to make with your kids, Easter biscuits and Simnel biscuits.
Aly’s daughter is already eager to make some more biscuits and we aren’t suprised as they sound so scrummy, containing ingredients including mixed apple pie spice, cinnamon, currants, marzipan and sugar coated chocolate eggs just to name a few to tickle your taste buds!
Click on the image to go direct to the recipe!
Angry Birds Easter Egg Craft
Over at Red Ted Art, Maggie demonstrates Easter Egg blowing and decorating with a twist…. an Angry Birds twist!
With instructions on how to blow eggs and decorate your angry birds using acrylic paints and basic craft items, your children can proudly show off their decorated eggs.
Click on the Angry Bird image to go direct to step by step instructions on making your very own Angry Bird characters.
Here are some more Easter craft ideas we are sure you will love:
Kinder Egg Suprise craft - Easy Spotty Eggs - Chocolate Easter Nest - Easter Chick Cards - Easter Bonnets - Cotton Wool Lambs - Egg Candles - Easter Egg Decorating
Quick and Easy Easter Egg Cupcakes
Over at www.mummyalarm.co.uk , they absolutely love cupcakes and seeing that Easter is just around the corner, have decided to share their quick and easy Easter Egg Cupcake recipe with you.
The cupcakes look lovely on an Easter-themed table and are really easy to make.
Click on the image to go direct to the recipe!
Cress Egg Heads
The Flying Start team love this fantastic idea over at www.kidsonestopshop.co.uk .
This is a great activity to do with children. Not only do they get involved with being all crafty, they get to grow something too!
Cress grows in a matter of days and you don’t even need soil!
With just some empty egg shells, basic craft materials and some cress seeds, you and your children can make a whole egg head family!
Click on the image to go direct to the simple step by step instructions!
Bubble Painting Easter Chicks
Over at thinlyspread.co.uk they have been having lots of fun blowing yellow bubbles to create fantastic Easter Chicks.
This is so simple and so satisfying. It can get very messy so it is usually very popular with children and the author of Thinly Spread says “I have even had success with those who are not keen on getting their hands dirty! ”
Flying Start thinks this is a brilliant crafty idea to keep little ones (and even bigger ones!) entertained this Easter.
Click the image to find how to make Bubble painted Easter chicks, plus a sneak preview of the finished product!
Vegetarian Easter Pie
theveggieexperience.blogspot.co.uk features a great Vegetarian main course dish which can be eaten with roast potatoes, vegetables and all the trimmings over the Easter weekend. Clare, editor at The Veggie Experience says “I quite like having vegetarian pies when the meat-eaters are tucking into their roast as they are quite substantial, fill you up and you don’t feel like you haven’t had a proper meal – which is what I feel like if I have just been served the potatoes and veg without the meat.” Clare’s inspiration came from a Harvest Pie recipe which uses lots of root vegetables, she adjusted the vegetables to suit the season. Click on the image to go direct to the recipe!
Crafty Kid’s Chocolate Easter Chicks
‘Absolutely Fabulous’ is what Flying Start thinks about these yummy scrummy funky chocolatey Easter chicks!
A Mummy Too shows you how to make a family of funky chicks using Cadbury creme eggs, orange chocolate buttons, white chocolate buttons and milk chocolate buttons.
The only problem is… they look too cute to eat!
Click the pic for instructions on how to make your own family of funky Easter chicks!
Daffodil Biscuits
The recent sunshine inspired the-gingerbread-house.co.uk to make these lovely daffodil biscuits. If you want an Easter recipe but without the hassle, then this idea is just for you. Using a gingerbread biscuit kit from a supermarket, The Gingerbread House improvised using an alternative cutter to create daffodil shaped spring biscuits for Easter. The best part…. you can make 12 biscuits out of one mix!
Click on the image to go direct to the recipe!
Over at Mums The Word, Jayne has been busy making Easter Cupcakes, which we have to say look totally scrumptious!
With simple ingredients, a simple method and an amazing outcome, we are sure you will agree that these cupcakes already have your taste buds tingling!
Jayne has shared the recipe here with us. You can visit Mums The Word by clicking on the cupcake image.
Ingredients
Cakes
- 100g butter or margarine
- 100g caster sugar
- 100g self-raising flour, sifted
- 2 eggs
- 1/4 teaspoon baking powder
- 1/2 teaspoon vanilla essence
Icing
- 140g/5oz butter, softened
- 280g/10oz icing sugar
- 1-2 tbsp milk
- few drops green food colouring
Decoration
- White ready roll icing
- Yellow food colouring
- Clean paintbrush
- Mini eggs
Equipment
- Mixing bowl
- Cupcake cases
- Whisk
- Teaspoons
- Piping bag
- ‘Grass’ nozzle (Wiltons number 233)
Method (found here: http://www.cupcakerecipe.co.uk/cupcake-recipe/method/14/ and here: http://www.bbc.co.uk/food/recipes/basicbuttericing_73263)
- Preheat the oven to 180°C (Electric oven | Electric fan oven 160°C | Gas Mark 4) and place 12 paper cases into a muffin tin.
- Using an electric whisk, food processor or wooden spoon, beat the butter and sugar until very light and fluffy.
- Add the eggs one at a time, beating each one in well before adding the next. Add the vanilla essence if using.
- Carefully fold in the flour (and baking powder if using).
- Alternatively, you can mix the ingredients together using a food processor. Use the pulse button to mix together in between adding the ingredients in the order above.
- Bake in the oven for 10 – 20 minutes. After 10 minutes, check to see if the cupcakes are ready by inserting a cocktail stick into one of the cupcakes. If it comes out dry then the cupcakes are done. If not, then back in the oven for a few minutes more. Don’t overcook the cupcakes otherwise they will dry out. Lift the cupcakes out of the muffin tin and leave to cool on a wire rack.
- Once the cakes have cooled, make the icing by beating the butter in a large bowl until soft. Add half of the icing sugar and beat until smooth.
- Add the remaining icing sugar and one tablespoon of the milk and beat the mixture until creamy and smooth. Beat in the milk, if necessary, to loosen the mixture.
- Stir in the food colouring until well combined.
To Decorate
- Half fill the icing bag with the green icing and ice each cupcake all over. To make a grass effect, hold the nozzle a few millimetres away from the cake, squeeze the bag until a little comes out and then pull the bag directly upwards.
- Roll out your white icing and use daisy shapes cutters of various sizes to put on each cake. You can paint a little blob of yellow food colouring to the middle of each daisy.
- Place a couple of mini eggs on top too, for a really Eastery feel!
This article titled “Easter attractions: tips to beat the rush and save money” was written by Lisa Bachelor, for guardian.co.uk on Wednesday 4th April 2012 14.33 UTC
Girlhood explained online
What must it be like growing up female now? What must it feel like to be 14 today, growing up in a world where, rather than being limited to reading Judy Blume novels and More magazine’s “position of the fortnight”, slyly devoured in the WH Smith by the 260 bus stop, things like Rookie exist? Rookiemag.com is a site edited by Tavi Gevinson, the 15-year-old blogger who Lady Gaga called “the future of journalism”, and, as per, she was right.
They publish three times a day (after school, at dinnertime and before bed), things like “A guide to navigating the end of a friendship”, “Literally the best thing ever: Glitter”, and, my favourite, “How to look like you weren’t just crying in less than five minutes”. This speaks to me at 31 – I can only imagine its impact had I read this in my teens. At the recent TedxTeen event, Gevinson talked why she launched the site last year. “One thing that can be very alienating,” she said of current “empowering” female role models, “is that girls then think that to be feminists they have to live up to being perfectly consistent in their beliefs, never being insecure, never having doubts, having all the answers… And this is not true. And actually recognising all the contradictions I was feeling became easier once I realised that feminism was not a rulebook but a discussion, a conversation, a process.”
I am not nostalgic for those years when it felt like the braces on your teeth were an aching physical metaphor for life. A time when you couldn’t talk about feeling awkward and oily and different, because that would’ve meant admitting that, before then, you were faking normality, and fakery was the worst crime of all. Those normal girls who weren’t like us, who were in perfect control, their bodies contained. Who could talk to adults, and boys, and who didn’t pull their jumpers over their knuckles or hide behind their fringes. The girls in magazines, gambolling white-teethed along a beach. Gambolling wasn’t for us. We would definitely trip over our feet and someone would definitely laugh.
The world worries for teenage girls today. All the porny influences, the sexting, the surgery – all the saturated pink. But counteracting these pressures to conform are the voices like those on Rookie, ones that are non-prescriptive, enthusiastic, embarrassing, funny. Ones that, by unpicking the awkwardness of female adolescence and providing a place to talk about it, have helped feminism become almost fashionable. Today you don’t have to go searching for “your people” at libraries and record shops. They’re all there in your Wi-Fi, screaming about hair dye. The internet is the indie-club toilet of the universe. This is where young women can talk really noisily about who they fancy, compare tights’ deniers and learn that they don’t have to dress like strippers unless they really, really want to. That there are other people just like them who are also feeling angry and weird and like everything’s awful, and that, even alone in front of a computer, they can feel part of something. This is the other side of the internet’s menace, that bit that parents and the papers see. These are the ribbony networks of girldom that tie the web together – they are well-lit roads through the intimidating, dark bits.
Mine was the last generation to grow up without the internet at home – I wonder what we would be like if we’d had the whole web to play with. Instead of wandering through our teenage years with only Just 17 to teach us how to be, would we have stormed into adulthood with our eyes open, leading with our personalities? And what does it mean that for us our adolescence is still so present, that Rookie resonates so strongly, that a schoolgirl is one of the sanest, most articulate voices in the media today? Rather than having grown up, she makes me feel like I’ve just got really good at being 16.
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