Lemons

One of our children had brought in two buckets of lemons that he had picked off his lemon tree at home. We talked about what we could do with them.
The first idea was to make a lemon cake. We squeezed and grated the zest off the lemons to add to the cake mix. Then we baked it in the oven to have for afternoon tea. It was delicious!
We also decided to make some lemon curd in the microwave. The recipe asked for a lot of lemon juice so we squeezed and squeezed the lemons and kept measuring in the jug to see when we had enough. Finally, after about 20 minutes of squeezing there was enough juice. We added sugar, eggs, lemon zest and butter and then cooked it in the microwave for about 10 minutes. We left the lemon curd to cool and the children were surprised to see that it had gone all thick after an hour.
We had used the lemon curd in our sandwiches for morning tea but we still had heaps left so we decided to make lemon curd and jam tarts. We added butter to flour and rubbed them together until the mixture was like breadcrumbs and then we mixed in water to make our pastry dough. The children rolled out the balls of pastry and cut out circles to go into the muffin tins. We put lemon curd into some of the pastry cases and jam into others and baked them in the oven.
We really appreciate donations of fruit and vegetables from parents and we always try to come up with lots of different and interesting ways to utilize seasonal fruit and vegetables.

The Giant Jam Sandwich

We have been reading the book ‘The Giant Jam Sandwich’ by John Vernon Lord . We thought it might be interesting to make our own giant jam sandwich (although for obvious reasons not as big as the one in the book, which had to be towed by a tractor!).
We talked about how we could make it and decided to also make the butter and jam, as well as the bread.
On Tuesday we made the butter by shaking containers of cream with a pinch of salt. This was hard work and luckily there were lots of children to share the shaking. When it turned solid we tipped it onto a plate and drained off the butter milk. We put it in the fridge to go hard.
On Wednesday we decided to use jam from the shop because we couldn’t find any strawberries! Then we set to work making the bread.
We mixed sugar into warm water and sprinkled yeast on the top. The warm water ‘woke up’ the yeast and it started to eat the sugar which made the yeast bubble. Then we mixed in the flour and we all took turns kneading the dough.
We baked our loaf in the oven- it smelled good!
When it was cooked we split it in half, and covered it with butter and jam. We ate it for afternoon tea.
Paige said our sandwich was yum.
Leo said it was yummy scrummy for my tummy
William said it was yum yum yum.
Lorraine said it was delicious!