Carddies new sets!!

Raquel and Esther’s children love to colour.  One rainy seaside holiday Raquel started drawing figures on the backs of cereal packets for her children to play with and Carddies were born…….

We’re a huge fan of  Carddies in this household and so I had to let you all know about their latest sets! Farm & Nativity!

The theme of Nativity is well-suited to the Christmas period and the addition of Carddies Farm ensures the range appeals to younger children.  Each set contains 12 double-sided, hand-drawn characters made of card with stands, 12 colouring pencils and a hand-drawn card scene as a backdrop; all packaged in a sturdy box so they can be “taken with you wherever you go”.  Now not only do you have these two fantastic themes they provide 10 more!

Each set is tailor-made for boys and girls aged between 4 and 10:  Ballet, Cavemen, Fairies, Football, Knights, Family One & Two, School, London, Sports and now Nativity and Farm. These make excellent gifts for your kids, birthdays, Christmas and they are perfect for taking in your bag or in the car while you’re out and about. A mum recommend to me as using them when they went out to a restaurant and boy are they fantastic for this. I think they were more carried away with the colouring in and playing that they were disappointed when the food finally arrived!  

They are well-priced gifts for children and make perfect stocking fillers. £8.99 from http://www.carddies.com/ Carddies are available from the Carddies store at www.amazon.co.uk  and from the other stockists listed at www.carddies.com

Country Kids

This is our latest post for Fionas linky over at Coombe Mill. Its a fantastic link up for getting your kids out and about! This weekend we ended up at one of our old favourites over at Wisley. We thought with the Olympic bike race on it would be pack but I dont think I've ever seen it so quiet! It was wonderful and as you can see below the boys adored the space to just run!

Peekaboo behind the trees

Looking for Big Bad Barry

But which one is he?

The garden was full of gorgeous flowers!

A quick game of skittles on the lawn

Followed by a guess the veg!

And the stopping on the way back to finish our ice cream!

Kitchen Cheat Sheet

If you remember a couple of months ago I popped on a handy conversion chart on here for you? Well thanks to Everest I have managed to find a far more concise one. Not only does it have the general oven temperatures but it also has the perfect time for boiling and steaming veg (don’t you just hate soggy veg?) How to stack your fridge properly! Pretty much any household you can possible think of. What do you think? Wonderful to print off no? Why not print one off to pass to do any students heading off to uni for the first time or just to leave around the kitchen in the hope others will read it too? ;)

Lemon Drizzle Cake

This weekend it was Rorys birthday and he asked for a Lemon Drizzle cake as his birthday cake. I’ve never made a lemon drizzle before so I hunted round online and found this amazing recipe! I did alter it slightly and it tasted amazing! Chuck all the ingredients into one bowl and whisk! Fabulously quick!

Lemon drizzle cake

Prep time: 30 minutes

Baking time: 1 hour

Servings: 10

Syrupy and citrusy, cut yourself a slice of sweet and sour splendour.

Lemon Cake:

175g (6oz)	self-raising flour
1	teaspoon baking powder
175g (6oz)	Butter or Marg
175g (6oz)	caster sugar
3	medium eggs
2	tablespoons milk
2	lemon rinds, finely grated

Drizzle:
2	lemons, juiced and strained
115g (4oz)	caster sugar (I used icing sugar)

Method:

Start by preheating your oven to 180°C, 350°F or gas mark 4.

Then sift the flour and baking powder into a large mixing bowl, add the remaining cake ingredients and beat together until smooth.

Grease and line the base of a 1kg loaf tin and spoon in the mixture.

Bake for an hour or until cooked.

Turn the lemon drizzle cake out.

Warm the lemon juice and sugar together.

And now for the main event, drizzle the lemony syrup all over the lemon drizzle cake and watch it soak in. Mmmmm.

	Per serving	GDAs for average adults*
Calories	322	16%
Sugars g	29.2	32%
Fat g	15.4	22%
Saturates g	5.1	26%
Salt g (based on sodium)	0.73	12%

Milk cheaper than water?!

You might have seen on the news today and across twitter about the 1000 odd farmers visiting Westminster today to demonstrate their anger and frustration about their pay from dairy processors for their milk they produce being cut. It seems rather unfair to my mind that in the shops these days when you order a coffee most of the time its fair-trade (the workers are being given a good price) but the farmer who produced the milk is being screwed over! We’ll save the third world farmers but turn a blind eye to ours?

Dairy farmers like most farmers work 24hrs every day 365 days a year with little or no time off. They milk their cows twice times a day a process which takes hours. Most dairy farmers are on contract to one of the top three milk processors and the contracts are long! There’s little other option especially when the processor decides to cut the cost they pay their farmers. Many are tied into contracts that force them to sell their milk at 25p/litre which even with all costs slashed still costs more than 30p/litre to produce. All they are asking is a fair set price in their contracts. Not much to ask for when you consider our European neighbours get as much as 10p litre more than ours do!

From the 1^st August Wiseman, Dairy Crest, Arla and First Milk have announced they will drop the price they pay their farmers by up to 2p a litre (4p since the start of most recent contracts) Bear in mind Dairy crest already make 9.8p profit after cost per litre.

30p/litre is the cost to produce!

Producers Pay Their Farmers

Wiseman – 24.73p

Dairy Crest – 24.92p

Arla – 24.5p

Supermarkets Pay Their Farmers

M & S – 31.93p

Tesco – 29.56p

Sainsburys – 30.5p

Waitrose – more than 29p

Morrisons – 25.92p

Asda – 25.52p

Co-op – 25.73p

The cost to us is 46p a pint (that’s just over half a litre)

Doesn’t seem quite fair somehow does it? Perhaps made worse by the agriculture minister admitting that while he knew where the milk came from he didn’t know the cost of it! After all his wife apparently buys the milk! The farmers are asking to be paid a fair price and a fair price on the shelf for you! Please sign their petition and get behind them!

http://epetitions.direct.gov.uk/petitions/6424

Or follow their struggle on twitter #sosdairy