Mighty Money Savers

I love baking, but find cake pops quite daunting.  Dr Oaker sent us some ingredients to try their Spooky Ghost Cake Pops and over the weekend we will be giving them a try. Preparation time : 2 hours plus cooling and chilling Cooking time:  40 minutes plus 10 minutes to melt 2 lots of chocolate ​ Ingredients: For the cake balls: ·  120g Dr. Oetker 72% Cocoa Extra Dark Fine Cooks Chocolate ·  150g soft unsalted butter at room temp ·  200g Light Muscovado Sugar ·  3 medium free range eggs, lightly beaten ·  2 tsp Dr. Oetker Madagascan Vanilla extract ·  125g Plain Flour For the cake pops: ·  2 X 100g bags of Dr. Oetker White Chocolate Chips melted for sticking the balls onto the sticks & coating the cake pops ·  Teaspoon of vegetable oil To decorate the ghosts: ·  1 x  pack of Dr. Oetker White Regal Ice ·  Icing sugar for rolling out ·  Dr. Oetker White Designer Icing for sticking the regal ice to the cake pops ·  Dr. Oetker Jet

How often do you tell your kids that they can not play with their food.  Well this weekend we made an exception and had a blast making Jelly (jello) Monsters with a selection of Jellies from  Hartley's Firstly we made the jelly's.  This is great fun for kids.  They cut up the blocks of jelly using scissors, measure the boiling water, mixed, added the cold water, poured into moulds and then took them outside to set.  In fact my boys at nine and wight did this all without me! Then I let the lost with the Jelly, some icing and some sweets and they had THE best time making Jelly Monsters. Even better, once they had finished making them they enjoyed eating them and then kept telling me they had monsters in their tummy. So why not take a leaf out of our book and play with your food this coming weekend.

I am going to admit now that we don't buy inexpensive bathroom products due to two reasons, one the boys have both suffered with eczema and two I have an issue with SLS (sodium lauryl sulfate) making me itch. So it is important for me to make sure that our products last and I am going to admit that I learned this tip from Lizzie at Me and my shadow and it has transformed how much we spend on products and how long they last. Did you know that in the UK we spend around £14 million on toiletries and I am going to admit again that I possibly spend a large proportion of that, so anyway to save money is good to me! So what is this phenomenal tip that I received? Just use less........................ Yes, really just use less and this is more important with products that contain no parabens or SLS as these are often the foaming agent, We are programmed to only think that toiletries, especially soaps and shampoos are only doing their job is they are foaming and that we