Racing!

I did another race a few days ago. Was lots of fun, here's some photos from my day

I booked this 10K ages ago. I think it is a good job I didn't see this in advance!

The rain definitely fell, and fell and fell and fell.

Hiding in the car while I wait for the race to start...

Starting to wonder if this is actually a good idea?

Once I was over the finish line I definitely was pleased I ran though :-) The rainbow arch was the finish line.

And when I got home the girls had made me trophies :-)

Tooth

It doesn't seem so long since Naomi got her first teeth and we were out to get her a toothbrush. Well, times have moved on far too fast and we now have a five year old that is very excited to have her first wobbly tooth! Her friends (mostly age six of course) have already started on their adult tooth journeys so she is more than happy to be joining the fun.

It's the one at the front, left of the middle two (her right). You can see that it's leaning into her mouth slightly.

Baking

Yes, we like baking! Here are a couple of projects we've embarked on during the summer. First up, a date night lemon meringue pie.

Making meringue is considerably easier now we have an electric mixer/whisk.

This is quite an efficient recipe as the egg whites go into the meringue and the yolks go in to the lemony stuff.

Cook until it's satisfyingly brown.

Eat. Splendid.

The girls wanted to make fairy cakes - they mixed, assembled, and decorated them with only a little bit of help from me! Lydia's ones are the two at the top, Naomi's on the left, and Miriam's on the right.

The first week of Bake Off this year involved making Jaffa Cakes, so we thought we'd give them a go. Mary Berry's recipe is here.

The sponges came out pretty well.

No particular jelly is specified in the recipe, except "orange", so that seems easy enough.

Though the jelly took ages to set. We thought it could have done with some extra gelatin to stiffen it up.

However, it cut out nicely enough, so on to the chocolate stage.

As suspected, the jelly wasn't stiff enough. As soon as the hot chocolate was added the jelly melted and started to flow off.

A couple turned out pretty well, but the others looked a bit messy.

By the end, they didn't look great but they, and the orange chocolate lumps under the cooling rack, tasted just great. Definitely one to try again!

Plants

This summer was slightly more successful than last when it came to the girls' gardening efforts. Not that this was all that difficult, we just needed a little sunlight and we were there! Here are some of the results...

Sunflowers grown from seeds that we harvested two years ago.
They did produce nice flowers (that I neglected to picture).
The only downside is that slugs ate all but two of the 8 plants.

We bought a strawberry plant this year, and got give another one.

Not bad for the first year!

Yum! 

Plenty of potatoes this year, and the broad beans and carrots came out well too.

The tomatoes have produced a few fruit now (all from the yellow one so far) but the only pepper so far fell off only part formed after a couple of weeks.

Not bad either!

The only downside to mucky activities.