Top Tips For Baking With Your Children

Baking with your children always feels like such a good idea to begin with, doesn't it? There's something wonderfully wholesome about donning an apron and showing them how to make food. And if that something happens to be sugary and buttery, then we've already fast-forwarded in our minds to the post-bake sample session that with any luck will involve a hot cup of tea and two minutes peace. To me, that's the point of no return.

The actual process of baking with children though? That's a minefield fit to test the courage of even the bravest soldier. Luckily for you, I've a few brilliant tips from my blogging buddies to hopefully make the experience more #instabaker than a scene resembling the aftermath of a natural disaster, with the attitude to match.

How to Make Homemade Rhubarb and Orange Gin

Rhubarb can be a tricky vegetable to know what to do with. It's sharp, tangy flavour is often muted by oodles of sugar in a crumble and even then, it can be too sharp for some delicate palates. But by combining it with the citrus sweetness of orange in this rhubarb and orange gin, I think the vegetable has at last found it's partner in crime.

I had had a bag of rhubarb in my freezer for some time, waiting for my decision on what to use it for. I didn't have enough in weight to make a wine, but it also felt a bit if a cop out to make a dessert - in which case, I then would have had to much of the stuff.

In the end, I took it to Facebook: rhubarb and ginger jam or rhubarb and orange gin. And, of course, the latter prevailed.

The Mother Next Door

The coiffured banker's wife puts the children to bed, then sits alone in her mansion waiting for a husband who'll be home late again. Her fingers are painted and her handbag Dior, but she risks more than a broken nail if she questions his absence.

She must have the perfect life, thinks the new mum who sits sobbing in the dark, desperately searching the internet for an answer to why her baby won't stop crying. She tries to comfort him, but he seems to sense her anguish and the misinterpreted rejection cuts deeper into her fraying inner strength.

How To Make Homemade Spiced Apple Vodka

Apples and cinnamon - what a match made in heaven. And whilst this liqueur needs some time to mature for the flavours to infuse as deeply as possible, there's no denying it's worth the wait. And it's so easy to make too!

In liqueur-making, apples can be combined with brandy, gin and even rum, but I love the sharpness that comes from a vodka blend. This recipe will make about a litre of the finished liqueur and stores well in a cool cupboard.

Christmas Gift Guide for Grown-ups

I love Christmas. I love it even more now I'm an adult and can enjoy the indulgent delights of booze-soaked Christmas puddings and warming sips of mulled wine. And there's the food too, of course: spiced, fruit cakes, citrus, sweet treats and deliciously steamy puddings covered in custard or a dollop of cool, whipped cream. That's why for this year's Christmas gift guide, I've chosen to feature the kind of food and drink I'd love to find in my own stocking on Christmas morning. The kid's Christmas lists can wait - this is all about us.

8 Top Tips For Keeping Everyone Safe On Fireworks Night

As we approach Winter and the nights draw in, this is a fantastic time of year to enjoy the spooky, sweet and spiced delights of Halloween and the wonder of Fireworks Night. But much as it's a great way to spend a evening together as family, attending a fireworks display comes with some obvious risks. 

Here are some tips for keeping everyone safe this Fireworks Night.

How To Make Homemade Turkish Delight

I absolutely love making yummy treats that I can gift to family to friends at Christmas. A few years ago I made fig, date and onion chutney which I gave away with a little bottle of my red berry liqueur, each wrapped with a twist of festive ribbon and tied with brown labels suitably marked 'Eat Me' and 'Drink Me'.

This is another of my favourites. There always seems something indulgent about Turkish delight. It's something I don't eat all that much throughout the rest of the year but come wintertime, I can't help but make up a batch.

What's more, it's so unbelievably easy! I mean, who has time for faffing when there's mulled wine to be drunk?

TrackR pixel - Review and Giveaway!

I dislike stereotypes. That said, I am stereotypically bad at finding ANYTHING in my handbag beneath the crumpled up receipts, used tissues (I know - gross), boiled sweets and biros. So you can understand the predicament I find myself in when having to search not just my handbag but the whole house, quite often to find my keys which one of my darling offspring has decided to pilfer and hide.

So you can guess my delight at being offered the opportunity to review the TrackR pixel bluetooth locator. It's a clever little device which allows you to locate lost items via an app on your smartphone. 

How To Make Home-Cooked Potato Peeling Crisps

This recipe for home-cooked potato peeling crisps from BBC Food popped up on my Facebook feed the other day and I knew immediately I had to give them a go. Okay, so they're probably not the healthiest snack in the world, but you need something to crunch on in between slurps of cool, crisp chardonnay, right?

The recipe appealed to me for a number of reasons: they're very simple to make, they require very few ingredients, and they are a great way to use up the peelings leftover from a mashed potato masterpiece.

I'm also hoping that the next time we have friends over for nibbles, it'll make me look like some sort of fantastic snack wizard. Fingers crossed.

How to Make Homemade Red Berry Rum

It's sad to think we're moving into Autumn and towards Winter but, to cheer you up when the nights start closing in and the kids have walked puddles of muddy slush all through your kitchen, here's a delightfully warming recipe I picked up from Good Housekeeping magazine back in 2011. The good news is that this only needs a month at most to mature and doesn't need any specialist equipment, so you can easily start it in the next month or so and it'll be ready for Christmas. Then all you have to do is pop on your slippers, curl up with Strictly and enjoy a tiny tot of this gloriously rosy liquid sipped from your favourite glass.

Despite having pasted this recipe into my recipe scrapbook six years ago (how is it that long ago?) this is actually only the second time I've made it. Though not due to any fault of it's own, that's for sure.