Meet our breakfast Weetabuddies!

At the weekends we usually have a little more time to relax and enjoy breakfast time than we do before school during the week so this weekend I prepped a vast array of different fruits and then let the girls loose with an array of healthy fruits, nuts and spreads so that they could hand-craft their own Weetabuddies.

Weetabix have created a collection of Weetabuddies to make breakfast that little bit more fun.  Each Weetabuddy has its own character and really comes to life once you get to know them!  I challenged the girls to make their own Weetabix characters - even myself and Mr. B. had a go at creating one as well - an entire mellow family of Weetabuddies.

Making a Weetabuddy is easy. 

Step 1. Grab a Weetabix biscuit.

Step 2. Top with lots of fresh or dried fruit, yoghurt, spreads or nuts to make a cheeky character of your choice

Step 3. Take a photo of your Weetabuddy and upload it to weetabuddies.com between now and the end of March 2015 to win prizes each day (and of course, fame for your Weetabuddy).

Step 4. Devour (well... that's what we did!)

Meet our Weetabuddy family.

The girls loved making Weetabuddies so much that I intend to make this a regular occurrance.  They both love fruit but I tend to avoid giving them 'just' fruit for breakfast and this is a great way of making sure that they have a balanced intake at breakfast time to keep them fuelled properly for the day.  It was also a brilliant way of convincing the rather fussy Lara that she really does enjoy cereal at breakfast time (we knew she did!)

Cooking With Children : Wholemeal Pear Breakfast Muffins

I love cooking muffins with Lara. There are lots of reasons why muffins work with toddlers; they rarely require exact measurements, you can shove all of the ingredients in a bowl at once and mix until your heart's content, and at the end of it all you have a single-serving snack suitable for a smaller appetite.

A couple of weeks ago we received a goody box from Princes packed full of tinned fruit (if you haven't entered my competition to win your own fruity breakfast hamper, do so now as it closes tomorrow). I mentioned at the time that I intended to reproduce one of my favourite breakfasts of all time, wholemeal pear muffins. So, as promised, here is my attempt. The recipe is based on a savoury wholemeal muffin recipe from a cookbook my Mum gave me (which is why the measurements are in cups). We tried to sweeten it with a little sugar and some honey but I think they are actually still quite savoury at the end of it with tiny bursts of sweet pear goodness!

INGREDIENTS (Makes 6-12 muffins depending on size)
1.5 cups of wholemeal flour (I could only find bread flour)
0.5 cups of plain white flour
1 cup porridge oats
0.5 cups brown sugar (I used demerara because its what I had in the cupboard)
2 tsp baking powder
1 cup milk (whole or semi-skimmed)
1 egg
1 tablespoon honey (if it is thick honey you may want to melt it a bit first)
1 heaped teaspoon ground cinnamon
1 teaspoon ground nutmeg
1 tin of peeled pears (about 4 pears) chopped into pieces no bigger than 1cm cubed (we used Princes tinned pears in grape juice!)


METHOD

1. Grease a muffin tin or (for a smaller muffin) a series of cupcake cases. I used the muffin tin, Lara insisted on cupcake cases. Preheat the oven to 180 degrees.


2. Get your little helper to mix together the flour, baking powder, oats and sugar in a big bowl.


3. Stir in the wet ingredients - milk, egg and honey


4. Sprinkle in the cinnamon and nutmeg (beware a toddler weilding a jar of cinnamon)


5. Finally stir in the chopped pears until the mixture is well combined.


6. Split the mixture evenly between the muffin cases. Our mix made 6 full-sized muffins and 3 cupcake sized ones.


7. Bake in the oven for 15 minutes or until golden all the way over. Once cooked, remove from their cases as soon as your (adult) fingers are capable of holding the hot containers. The longer you leave them in the cases, the soggier they will get (I know from experience).


8. If you want to serve them for breakfast you can either get up early to make them or else make them the night before and warm them up in the oven for 15 minutes before serving. The muffins don't taste anywhere near as nice cold as they do warm. I think they taste best served with a sliver of real butter. Lara prefers hers plain

Porridge Gate Returns - Meet The Good Guys

A few weeks ago I had a little rant about Blueberry 'flavoured' Paw Ridge children's porridge. My rant was driven by their claims of '100% natural ingredients' which didn't mention where the blueberry flavour had come from, and a whopping 12% sugar, most of which wasn't naturally occurring and had, for some reason, been added as a major ingredient to what was otherwise a healthy food stuff.

As a result of my rant, I was contacted by Rude Health to see if Lara and I wanted to put their organic fruity porridge through our rigourous Mother & Baby tests! I had previously tried some of the Rude Health's museli products, some of which I loved, some of which I managed to offload on my work colleagues because I didn't like the chunky bits!

We tried the Rude Health Fruity Date Porridge, and loved it!

After my previous porridge experience, the first thing I did was check the ingredients. The box contains the following... oats, more oats, oatmeal, dates (12%), apricots, apple, ground apple and cinnamon. Now, that really is 100% natural ingredients and there is nothing disguised with fancy names.

I then checked the nutritional content. Interestingly, it is actually higher in sugar than the Blueberry Paw Ridge but that's to be expected... with this amount of fruit inside the porridge, this is how much naturally-occuring sugar I would expect. There is no added, refined sugar, just that which is contained in the dried fruit.

For this reason, I would never expect to give Lara a huuuuuge bowl of this porridge for breakfast but I wouldn't have any problem giving it to her in small amounts. I know that with a bowl of fruity date porridge then she probably won't need one of the other pieces of fruit that I would normally offer her later in the day. At 16% sugar it is still significantly lower than most "children's cereals" which often come in at between 25 and 37% sugar.

The Rude Health porridge passed Lara's test. She eats it with as much enthusiasm as her other breakfast cereals (which is not that enthusiastically at present as she seems to have gone of the idea of breakfast at present, but things change and she'll be back to breakfasts soon). I wasn't sure I was going to be as much of a fan as I tend to go 'bluergh' to anything that tastes strongly of cinnamon.

Surprisingly, I actually feel that the level of cinnamon is JUST RIGHT. There is just enough for it to taste wintery and warming and I think I'd miss it if it weren't there. The porridge is no more difficult to cook than the finely milled Paw Ridge we tried the other day - it cooks in 3 minutes in the microwave but Mr. B. insists it tastes better when cooked on the stove.

I love the pieces of date and apricot in the porridge, it makes it so much more interesting than a normal plain bowl full of porridge oats.

Rude Health, thank you for proving that porridge can be tasty and healthy.