Ai-See Kweem!

Yup, that's how DN says "ice cream". He's still not very good with the S consonant clusters (/sk/, /sl/, /sm/, /sn/...) and he seperates the /s/ sound from the next consonant sound. So "scoop" becomes "ser-coop", "spud" (Bob The Builder's scarecrow friend) becomes "ser-pud" and "mosquito" becomes "moh-see-kee-toh". Hur hur hur...

Okay, back to ice cream. When he was almost 2 years old, his grandfather gave him some ice cream. He scooped a little bit on a spoon and DN had a little taste. He spat it out straight away (I think he didn't like that it was cold) but a minute later, the area around his mouth burst into red rashes. Oh dear!

For the past 2 months, I'd been searching high and low for ice lolly molds. NTUC, Cold Storage, United Square, Phoon Huat... but no luck. Finally I called Howard's Storage World and hooray! They had a set there for $11. But because I'm such a lazy bum, I didn't go down to Parkway Parade or Harbourfront. In the end, I still got my ice lolly molds, and for only $3.90 at Ikea. Woot! (It's good to be a lazy bum!) And it was DN who found the molds... at the outdoor furniture section, go figure!

So last weekend, I decided to make some safe, milk-free ice cream (or ice lollies rather) for DN. Because I was going to mix fruit and juice together, I needed my blender. I bought some mangosteen juice and soya milk (er yes, I tried to make soya ice cream) and used some leftover fruit I had in the fridge. You can also make juice lollies if you want, just pour juice into the molds, easy peasy. Many recipes I found online suggest mixing yoghurt in for the creamy taste but of course, DN can't take that, so his were just pure fruit and juice.

After blending the fruit with the juice (I made mangosteen-apple-banana ice lollies), I poured them into the molds. The one in the top right is soya-milk-banana. Er... let's just say I'm not trying that again!

I got DN involved too. He helped me pour the juice into blender and helped me put all the lids on. Of course, immediately after he put the lids on, he tried to pick them up straight away and eat his "ai-see-kweem"! LOL.

It took LOTS of explaining before DN would let those ice lollies go into the freezer.

When we got home that night, the ice lollies were nice and frozen. I took one out and tried to shake the lolly out of the mold. *SHAKE SHAKE SHAKE*! But to no avail. After several teeth-chattering moments, I finally used my "blain" and dunked the mold into a cup of water to melt it a little. The lolly slipped out and I presented it grandly to his majesty.

It was DN's FIRST ice cream and he absolutely LOVED it! He finished the entire lolly and has been bugging us for lollies morning, noon and night. I think the next time, I'll try a pure fruit lolly, no juice. That probably wouldn't melt so quickly and turn my son into a sticky, walking, talking mess!

This is definitely going to be a regular treat in our house. It's healthy because it's pure fruit and juice so I really don't mind giving it to DN more often. It's cheap compared to those pure fruit lollies you can find in Cold Storage ($5 for a lolly??!) and it's so easy to make. And of course, it's milk-free. :)

I think I'll try mango-banana-dragonfruit ice lollies next. If you're adventurous enough, you can try mixing some spinach (the salad kind, not the eng chye kind!) into the mix. The sweetness of the fruit should mask the vege taste and it's a way of sneaking vege into your toddler's diet. Oooh, sneaky sneaky. But it works, I read it online somewhere...

I wish I could do something about the colour though. It looks like cement!

Apple Crumble

Last week, I bought a big bag of pink lady apples. I like these apples because they are normally very sweet and very very crunchy. Yes, I said 'normally'. The apples I bought last week were so sour! So, besides making a face that looks like this, what else can you make with a big bag of sour apples?

Apple Crumble!

And because I'm such a cheat, I bought pre-made mini tart shells for the apple crumble. At least I'm an honest cheat huh? But I swear, it must have saved me 2 hours of sweating and trying to press dough EVENLY into an aluminium cup without losing my sanity, patience and head.

So today, all I had to do was pop those babies out of the box, chop up one apple and make the crumble topping. The only thing was, because of our blasted weather, the butter in the crumble kept melting, so I had to keep popping the bowl into the freezer, taking it out to crumble the mixture and then popping it back in before it started melting again. Except for that, it was pretty easy peasy. After DN woke up from his afternoon nap, I told him we were going to bake cakes and he was so happy. The first thing I got him to do was fill the tart shells with apple. And here we have Mr Sneaky caught in the act of eating some of the apples! Because of this, we ran out and I had to cut another apple up!

After that, I told him to add some raisins, cranberries and dried blueberries. He took it upon himself to reward himself for the effort by eating some of the raisins. -_-

Next was the crumble topping. Okay, I have to admit, at this part, my heart started palpitating and I had to take deep breaths as DN sprinkled crumble all over the tray, himself, his chair and the floor. I rotated these two mantras : "Mess can be cleaned. Mess can be cleaned. Mess can be cleaned." and "Ants won't come. Ants won't come. Ants won't come." Of course the buggers came. So I concentrated my efforts on squishing all of them rather than snatching the spoon out of my son's hand and doing it all myself. DIE ANTS DIE!

Here's Mr Messy looking very pleased with his apple crumble tarts.

We baked them for about half an hour before sharing one together for afternoon tea. It was SO delicious! DN would have scoffed down the whole tart if I had not snuck a few bites in for myself.

Milk-Free Orange Honey Muffins

DN's milk allergy is really strange. Sometimes, he can take cakes or biscuits with traces of milk in them and be perfectly fine. Sometimes, he eats a chocolate wafer biscuit and bursts into rashes. Up until now, we still don't know how much he milk he can actually take and we're not going to feed it to him bit by bit until he reaches the tipping point either. But thankfully, his allergy is really not that serious. At least he can take traces of milk, and even a little bit of butter.

Until he gets over this allergy (when he was 7 months old, his PD said some babies outgrow it by the time they're 1... I guess DN is not one of them!), this means no ice-cream, no yoghurt, no milk chocolate, no cheese and not too much butter. This also means we have to be careful with food when we eat out : no pizza, no creamy pasta, no cheese baked rice, no cream-based soups, no mashed potatoes, no scrambled eggs , no milky fish soup noodles. As you can probably guess, we never go Italian.

So before we baked muffins on Sunday, I surfed around for a milk-free muffin recipe. I rejected many recipes because they called for way too many ingredients. Gluten free soy compound? Err, I don't think my NTUC will have that. Rice milk? Who's going to drink the rest?! Apple cider vinegar? Eeep!

Finally I found this easy recipe that called for 'normal' things like honey, orange juice, sugar and flour, whoopee! The only thing I did differently was add 2 eggs instead of the egg substitute, used real butter instead of soy margarine and added banana chunks into each muffin. DN had a ball mixing all the ingredients together...

... adding (or flinging, at one point -_-) the banana chunks...

... and staring at the muffins as they baked in the oven.

They finally came out, nice, brown and smelling delicious! And we all sat down with some cold barley tea (soya bean milk for DN), butter and jam.

Try the recipe if you like light, fluffy muffins. If you like your muffins dense like cakes, then this is not the recipe for you. It's very light and tastes really healthy because it's not oily or sugary sweet. And it works as a basic muffin recipe because I can see it working with fillings like raisins, cranberries, apple chunks or chocolate chips. This recipe is going to be a permanent fixture on my fridge for sure. :)

But all good things must come to an end... and we can never escape from the bothersome washing up. *sigh*

The Best Butter Cookies EVER ...

... and I've lost the recipe. -_-

(Ling, help!)

Honestly, these are the best. The ingredients are like so "Duh, I knew that!" (flour, sugar, butter, egg yolks) but these little buggers taste damn good! DN had a fun time messing up the kitchen cookie-cutting all the cookies and a funner time eating them. Halfway through the cookie-cutting process, PF decided to make round little butter cookie balls and roped DN in to help. He gave DN a little piece of dough and said, "Roll the dough into a ball DN. Roll it!"

And DN rolled the dough across the table. -_-

Wah-hahaha... we couldn't stop laughing.


We had 2 little mounds of dough. One for anal-retentive me, one for DN. I really had to stop myself from snatching the dough out of DN's hands and redoing all the cookies. At one point, he was using the opposite side of the cookie cutter so we had some round cookies.


DN's cookies :)





No, an elephant didn't step on the cookies. The horrible looking ones are actually jam-filled and peanut butter filled cookies!





Can you spot the monster cookie that PF made? He's so proud of it. Whatever rocks your boat eh?

At the end of the baking session, there was dough EVERYWHERE! And the whole dining area was covered in a buttery film. I swear, the cleaning up took longer than the actual baking.