Apple Dappy

Step 1

Before cooking, wash your hands and put an apron on.
Weigh and measure the ingredients. Put some baking paper on a baking tray.

Step 2

Put the flour and butter together in a bowl and rub them together with your fingers. Just imagine you are tickling the ingredients. Now stir in the caster sugar using the fork. Mix again. Add some (but not all) of the cream and mix until you get a soft dough. (You may not need all the cream).

Step 3

Carefully grate the cored apple. Add to a bowl with a pinch of cinnamon and a heaped teaspoon of demerara sugar. Mix well with the teaspoon.

Step 4

Sprinkle some flour on your work surface, roll out the dough like pastry to about ½ cm thick. Try to keep a rectangular shape.

Step 5

Spread the apple mix on top (try to leave the juice in the bowl), then roll up like a sausage along the long side. Cut into 7 thick rings. Place one in the centre of the baking paper making sure you can see the spiral. Then add the remaining six around the outside in a circle, almost touching each other.

Step 6

Sprinkle the top of the apple dappy with the rest of the demerara sugar.

Step 7

You will need to ask a grown-up to help with this part. Place in a pre-heated oven at 200ºC fan/220ºC/Gas 7 for 20-25 minutes.

Step 8

Serve 1 spiral as a snack at tea time, or anytime

Strawberry Meringue Ice Cream

Step 1

Before cooking, wash your hands and put an apron on. Weigh and measure all the ingredients. There should be enough for four servings using the quantities shown.

Step 2

Using the whisk, whisk the cream in the bowl, until it’s light and fluffy. If you don’t have a whisk, you can use two forks held together.

Step 3

Add the yogurt and icing sugar to the cream and whisk it more.

Step 4

Place the strawberries on a small plate and then mash them with the back of a fork until they are squishy. Pull out any green stalks. Now tip the mashed strawberries into the cream mix.

Step 5

Hold a meringue nest over the bowl and crush it in your hand and then drop it into the mixture and give it a gentle stir.

Step 6

Pour the mixture into the lidded container and put it in the freezer for at least two hours or preferably overnight.

Step 7

Once the Strawberry Meringue Ice Cream has frozen take it out of the freezer to soften slightly and eat it! Note: homemade ice cream should be taken out of the freezer and put in the fridge about 30 minutes before serving.

Step 8

Serving suggestion: serve the four portions with some fresh berries such as raspberries, blackberries or blueberries. This dish can be frozen for up to one month.

Splodge Cakes 


You Will Need:

• 100g butter 
• 100g sugar
• 100g sifted self raising flor
• 2 eggs
• cocoa powder
• food colouring
• cake cases









•   Cream together 100g of butter and 100g of sugar. You'll also need 100g of sifted self raising flour and 2 eggs. Pop both of those in with the creamed sugar and butter, and get mixing!
•   When mixed, divide the cake mixture into three equal portions.

•   Here's how to make these little cakes in camouflage colours.

•   For the brown, use a tablespoon of cocoa powder. Just add it into one of the portions of cake mixture.

•   And for the green, use concentrate paste or food colouring. Again, add to another portion of cake mixture, then mix.

•   Once the colours are mixed, you need to splodge! There are two ways you can do this - you can either get a spoonful and splodge it in or you can put your mixture into a bag, snip off one of the corners and squirt it in!
•   Because you're splodging the colours in, they don't get mixed up. And when you bake them, the colours will stay separate so that you get a really colourful cake.

•   When you've done them all, cook the cakes at 190 degrees celsius or gas mark 5 for 15 minutes.

•   Once the cakes have cooked and cooled, you can ice them. The design looks really complicated, but it's very simple! Start off by getting your icing in camouflage colours - brown, green and yellow.

•   Roll out one of the colours with a rolling pin, but remember to put some icing sugar down first so that it doesn't get stuck to the table!
•   Then, tear off blobs of the coloured icings. Place them on the rolled out icing, then if you roll again, you'll see the pattern start to emerge!

•   Next, get a cutter that's the same size as the top of your cake, and cut out a circle of icing.

•   Then just carefully place the icing on top of each cake, like a lid.

Mini Christmas Puds 


You Will Need:

• 175g plain flour
• 150g butter or margarine
• 150g Soft Brown Sugar
• ½ teaspoon mixed spice
• ½ teaspoon ground nutmeg
• 1 grated lemon rind
• 1 tablespoon black treacle
• 3 large eggs
• 40g ground almonds (optional)
• 50gm blanched almonds (optional)
• 250g currants
• 150g sultanas
• 75g raisins
• 50g glaced cherries
• 50g mixed peel









•   Grease a 7" tin and set oven at gas mark 1 or 140C.
•   Cream butter and sugar.

•   Add all dry ingredients and the black treacle.

•   Mix in the eggs and flour. Put mixture into the greased tin.

•   Cook for 3 hours on the middle shelf of the oven.

•   You need to wash your hands now. Break off a piece of the fruit cake and roll and squeeze it into a ball using your hands.

•   Keep going until you've used up all of your cake and made quite a few balls!
•   Now make up some icing by mixing icing sugar and water. Add the water gradually so that the icing doesn't become too runny.
•   Spoon a little icing onto the top of each of the balls of cake. Neaten and smooth with another (clean) spoon.

•   Now you can decorate your mini Christmas puds with berries and holly. You can cut these from coloured marzipan. Look at that! Realistic, eh!

•   If you don't like fruit cake you could use chocolate instead!
         

Edible Hedgehog

You Will Need:

• mashed potatoe
• spaghetti
• sausages
• cherry tomatoes









•   So - start off with some mash. You can use the instant kind, or the real stuff - it's up to you. The amount you need depends on the size of the hedgehog that you want to make. Carefully spoon about a third of the mash onto a baking tray.
•   Mould it into an oval with a fork, and add a nose shape at one end. With the back of a spoon, make a well in the mash.

•   Into the well, add some tinned spaghetti. Drain off most of the tomato sauce first, and take care not to overfill.

•   Take the rest of the mash and cover up the spaghetti, building up the rest of the shape.

•   The eyes and nose of the hedgehog are made from cherry tomatoes chopped in half. Or, if you're making a baby hedgehog, use peas instead!
•   When you've finished shaping the mash into the hedgehog's body, just give it a bit of a spiky texture with a fork.
•   Add on the eyes and nose and the legs. These are just small sausages.

•   Pop the hedgehog into the oven on Gas Mark 4 (180 degrees celsius) for about 25 minutes, or until the spikes brown nicely.

•   Plus, why not add some grated cheese for extra flavour or for an extra spiky hedgehog, stick in some savoury sticks after it's been baked.

•   And there's no reason not to experiment with different fillings. If you're not keen on spaghetti, how about baked beans?

Double Shape Cake

You Will Need:

• 200g butter
• 200g caster sugar
• 200g self raising flour 
• 4 eggs









•   In a bowl, cream together the butter and caster sugar.
•   Then into the butter and sugar, mix 4 lightly beaten eggs and the flour.

•   Give it all a good mix until it looks like this!

•   Divide the mixture equally into two.

•   This will be for the two different cake colours.

•   Choose any colours you like. Use a teaspoon of food colouring paste - this will give the cake a good strong colour.
•   You can buy food colouring paste in any catering or cake decorating shop.

•   Mix it well so that the colour spreads evenly.

•   Next, grease and flour two 20cm cake tins.

•   Do this by wiping some butter around them and then sprinkling some flour into them.

•   Dollop the mixture into the tins.

•   Cook the cakes at 180c or Gas Mark 4 for about 20 minutes - until they're springy to the touch!
•   Once the cakes are cooked and cooled down you can cut out the circles.
•   To make the circles, the best things to use are different size pastry cutters.

•   If you don't have any pastry cutters, you can make some card circle templates.

•   Simply put a template onto the cake and cut round.

•   The first cutter Stephen used is 15cm wide.

•   Put it on the cake and make sure there's an even space all the way around the cutter and the edge of the cake.

•   Then cut the cake with a smaller circle - this one is 10cm.
•   Use a final cutter of 5cm to cut a small circle in the middle.
•   Then do the exact same on the other cake.

•   Slot the circles of cake together like this alternating the colours as you go.

•   Spread some butter icing made from butter and icing sugar over one layer of the cake.
•   You could use jam if you want to.

•   Then carefully sandwich the other cake on top.

•   Use your favorite colour to make the cake.

•   Enjoy!

Chocolate Salami

You Will Need:

. chocolate
• apricots
• glace cherries
• raisins
• mini white marshmallows
• icing sugar.









•   Get started by breaking up the 200g of chocolate. You can either do this by hand, or by putting it into a polythene bag and giving it a good whack with a rolling pin!
•   Once you've broken up the chocolate, you need to melt it. Do this by carefully pouring some recently-boiled water into a bowl. Fill it to about a quarter full.

•   Put the broken chocolate into a smaller bowl and place it in the larger bowl. The heat from the water will melt the chocolate, you just have to give it an occasional stir.

•   While the chocolate is melting, you can prepare the rest of the ingredients. You need 50g of apricots, 50g of raisins, 50g of glace cherries and 50g of mini white marshmallows.When the chocolate has melted, take it out of the bowl with the water and add in the rest of the ingredients.

•   Give the whole thing a thorough stir until everything has been covered by the chocolate!
•   Now take some cling film or clear wrap and lie it flat on a chopping board. Now, spoon out the chocolate-covered mixture into a sausage shape on the cling film or clear wrap.

•   Fold the cling film or clear wrap up. This will help you to mould the mixture into a sausage shape. Twist the ends and tuck them underneath, then transfer the wrapped mixture into the fridge for about half an hour, until it's cool to the touch.

•   When it comes out of the fridge it'll be very firm. Peel off the clear wrap, then dust the sausage in icing sugar to make it look more like salami. Then put it back into the fridge for another four hours.
•   All you have to do then is slice and serve!

•   For a different - or more realistic - salami, why not try using white chocolate and adding some red food colouring?