The baking buddies have been finding out about the change of season and how it makes food scarce for the birds.  During our baking session today the children got the opportunity to make ‘cakes’ for the birds. Each buddy made one feeder to take home and an extra one for school – this will hopefully encourage birds to visit. We gave the extra feeders to the nursery for their garden, so hopefully the children in nursery will get watch the birds from their window.

The bird cakes were fun to make but very messy as the children used their hands to mix the lard and dry ingredients together. The lard was useful to bind the mix however the buddies did not like its smell! The children used a mixture of oranges and yoghurt pots to hold the bird cake. To use the orange the buddies had to remove the juice and scoop out the rest of the orange leaving just the skin. The buddies got the opportunity to taste the orange juice at snack. After our baking was finished some of the buddies made robin pictures.

The Baking Buddies agreed to create some cakes to sell at interval time and give money raised to Children In Need charity. This meant the buddies had a very busy morning as they only had one session to prepare all the cakes ready to sell for 10.45am!

The buddies split into two teams. Mrs McBride helped one group of buddies make TOPHAT cakes using chocolate, marshmallows and smarties. The rest of the buddies worked with Mrs Wilson and Mrs Reynolds to make gluten free SHORTBREAD.

Once the shortbread was cooked all the baking buddies worked really well together to decorate the shortbread with Pudsey Bear yellow icing and coloured spots.

The Baking buddies went round some of the classrooms to tell their classmates about their project and to encourage children to visit their stall. Two buddies kindly gave up their play-time to sell the cakes at the tuck shop. The cakes were very popular and they managed to sell all cakes and raise £16.10 for Children in Need!

Earlier this session the Baking Buddies spent time looking through books and recipe cards to find things the children wanted to make during our baking slot.  Rock cakes was one of the recipes selected that day.

Rock cakes allowed the children to get messy hands again as they tried the rubbing in technique that they had enjoyed doing whilst making shortbread.  The rest of the dried ingredients were mixed in with a wooden spoon and then the egg added to make a dough. The children had to share out the dough as a group and then used their dough to make small balls.  These were put on baking tray ready to go into the oven. At this point we adapted the recipe and added silver balls as decoration.  The silver balls melted slightly in the heat of the oven and made our Rock cakes sparkle.  We decided to change the name of the cakes to MOON ROCKS! Following on from our ‘Moon Rock’ baking some of the group decided to use construction sets available to create their own rockets to fly to the moon.