When things go wrong!

Many people have asked me how I "do" it, how my recipes seem to work for me and how amazing my photos look....

SO, I thought it only fair to confess that this is really NOT always the case, I am as human as the next person (well almost :P ) and have bad days and good days.

Learning to bake differently, especially when you are substituting the basic ingredients for a recipe takes time and patience. It may work straight away, but you are certainly NOT unusual if it doesn't! In fact, I am now so used to baking "free from" that actually my "normal" baked goods don't always work...

So I thought I would share this with you - even with a familiar, fail safe recipe I can make mistakes. This was supposed to be a free from chocolate cake.... except I forgot the raising agent.

*Ahem* Make that a chocolate biscuit.

That's when a teenager comes in handy.

It's finished before they realise it's slightly different!!!!

Smoothies

In addition to our "Biscuit Bake-Off" the twins and I have been trying some new ideas as I try and hand over a little of the control over their diet.

My daughter is far more willing to experiment, and far less fussy than her twin brother. She had been reading about how to make smoothies in one of the cookbooks we have here and actually came to me unprompted with her version of the recipe.

To be honest, it's not necessarily a "recipe" because you can put pretty much anything into a blender and whizz it up. What interested me was her plan to try with and without banana, which she hates.

Ingredients

• Raspberries
• Cherries
• Grapes
• Blackberries (not the cheapest time of the year to be trying this!!!)
• orange juice

then the same again with banana added.

She did actually try both versions, but pronounced the second "pretty disgusting, too bananery". No surprise there then....

But what really interested both of us was how thick the one with banana became, and very quickly. It was a useful reminder that banana is an excellent alternative to other raising agents and makes a good thickener too!