This post comes from Lisa and her lovely daughters, Rosa and Emilie.

Hi Girls and Boys, this week I decided to bake some shortbread with my daughters as they are doing Scottish activities for school. This is a fun way to practice your measuring and cutting skills.

You will need:

230grams unsalted butter, room temperature and cut into cubes

250g plain flour

120g caster sugar

Pinch of salt

To measure the ingredients out you could see if your grown up could help you, and also please make sure that you use a plastic or butter knife to cut the butter up (or let a grown up do this bit!).

1. Ask your grown up to turn on the oven so that we can bake our shortbread  – the temperature of the oven should be 180.
2. When you have weighed all of your ingredients, place them all into a food processor (or mixer) and mix until the ingredients look a bit like breadcrumbs. Stop your mixer and test if the mixture squishes together like playdoh when you pick it up! If it does then your mix is finished. If not, pop it back into the mixer and mix again until it does.
3.  Using a square or round baking tray, get some greaseproof paper and line the tray with it – this is so that the shortbread doesn’t stick when we have baked it and try to take it out of the tin. If you don’t have greaseproof paper you can rub a bit of butter all around your tray, and this will do the same job.
4.  Pour your mixture carefully into your tray, and use your fingers to spread it out and press it down so that it is nice and even, and not too bumpy!
5. If you want to you can use a fork to gently poke some holes into the top of the shortbread, but don’t poke the fork too deeply
6. Ask your grown up to put the shortbread into the oven, and set a timer for 30-35 mins. When the timer goes off your grown up should check that the shortbread is nice and golden and feels firm like a biscuit. If it does then you can take it out of the oven now.
7. Let it cool down,  and your grown up can cut it into fingers for you. You could sprinkle some more sugar on top if you want to.
8. Taste your shortbread, and let us know how it turns out

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As we are focusing on Scottish activities, we decided to have a go at making our own McCoos! Steven Brown is a Scottish artist, and he makes very colourful paintings, lots of them are animals  – have a look at the pictures below and see if you recognise any of these. The one with the cow is very popular so you may have seen this one before.

You could have a go at home at making one of these pictures with some crayons, pens, paint or whatever you have. It can be a bit tricky to get the shape of the animal but it is good fun to give it a go (and you could use a picture to copy, that’s what we did).

Here are Rosa and Emilie’s drawings – they used oil pastels and pencil, and I helped Emilie with her horse shape. I bet that you could all do an amazing McCoo style picture too! Have a go and show us your results.