Kate & Mim-Mim: A Christmas Wish DVD Review

We are definitely beginning to get into the Christmas spirit now; Holly has been practicing for her role in this year's pre-school Christmas show and Lara has helped me make our Christmas cake so I'm allowing myself to start thinking about festivities. To get us into the Christmas mood we have been watching Kate & Mim-Mim: A Christmas Wish, out on DVD on from today, courtesy of FremantleMedia Kids & Family Entertainment!

Kate and Mim-Mim was new to me (although the girls had seen a couple of episodes before) - I really like the animation style and the honest simplicity of a story about a little girl and her toy bunny Mim-Mim. A Christmas Wish is a DVD full of wintery and festive episodes featuring snow, twinkly stars and Christmas wishes.  Each episode features a problem that Kate needs to solve so we twirls with her toy bunny rabbit until they are magically transported into a special world together and Mim-Mim is able to help her find new friends and clever ways to solve her problem - this often takes them on fun adventures together.

Both Lara (6) and Holly (3) very much enjoyed the DVD, especially the episode about snow bowling which sees Kate need to find enough snow to build a fort. I think this particularly appealed to Holly because she hasn't had more than a couple of minutes of snow play in her whole life and she still finds the idea of snow and ice extremely magical.  I think my favourite episode was the first one in which a house is overrun by kittens which are actually woolen mittens - very cute!

Kate & Mim-Mim: A Christmas Wish features 7 episodes in total as well as a music video.  My girls always go all gooey whenever they watch a TV show based around a Christmas theme and, while there is a wintery theme to the entire DVD, one of the episodes centres around Christmas Eve and it is this episode they have asked to watch again!

Kate & Mim-Mim is targeted at 4-6 year olds and I think it would make an excellent stocking filler for little people this Christmas as well as a wonderful way to help get your children into a Christmassy mood.  It costs around £7.99.

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Quick and Easy Christmas Cake Decoration Ideas

This weekend we have started making THE Christmas Cake.  It has become a little bit of a tradition that the girls help out with the Christmas Cake whether it is chopping the dried fruit, grating the orange zest or simply just mixing the gloopy dollopy mixture and making a wish.  We will make the cake now and then wrap it tightly in clingfilm and seal it in a box, returning to "feed" it with booze every few days between now and December.

Once December arrives we will decorate the cake together - I haven't quite decided on this year's theme but I think it will involve stars and gold or silver balls and glitter.  To help the girls get a bit of practice for the decoration, and to get them into the Christmas cake mood we made some simple Christmassy cupcakes together using a recipe from the Flora website where you can find 3 quick and easy Christmas Cake decorating ideas which can turn a simple cake into a wintery showstopper.

We made a simple chocolate cupcake recipe using 2 eggs, 125g plain flour, 125g caster sugar, 125g sunflower spread and a teaspoon of baking powder and then baked them in a medium oven for around 15 minutes until risen and golden (my own oven doesn't have any numbers on it any more so I have to guess what temperature it is!).

Once the cupcakes were cooled, we could have topped the cakes with a simple buttercream or basic icing paste made from icing sugar.  However, in my experience both of these things can get VERY messy when the kids are involved so instead we went back to basics and followed the Five Star Christmas Cupcake decorating instructions from the Flora website which are so simple that I could leave the girls to it and know that the cupcakes would look fabulous.

To make these Five Star Christmas Cupcakes you'll need a pack of ready-to-roll icing in a colour of your choice.  You have to kneed the icing until it is very soft, so that decorations will stick nicely to it but other than that you can leave the children to roll the icing and use cookie cutters to cut out festive shapes such as stars.

We used icing sugar, mixed with water to stick the stars to the top of the cupcakes and then decorated with sparkly edible balls and confetti and sprayed with a shimmery edible spray.  The girls always love sprinkling things onto the top of cupcakes but somehow this recipe, because it involved rolling and sticking, felt like they owned more of the process of decorating the cakes.

Disclosure: This is a sponsored post, but that doesn't stop it being fun to read.

Fireworks and Halloween Fun with #StreamTeam #NetflixHalloween

I love this time of year with the weird and wonderful costumes of Halloween followed closely by the magic and excitement of bonfire night.  Tonight we took Holly to her very first fireworks show at our local scout group - she went through every emotion from excitement, through fear and doubt to total amazement and then even disappointment once the show was over.

At the weekend we took the girls away for a fun weekend.  Lara and I were invited to be judges for the Great Pumpkin Carving Festival at the Tante Marie restaurant and culinary academy in Woking, Surrey.  We had a wonderful day watching a steady stream of people coming to carve pumpkins as well as exploring Woking Shopping.  The girls even got involved in a Sublime Science potion making experiment where they got to make their own sherbert fizz.

We stayed the night at the Premier Inn in Woking which was quiet and peaceful and made the perfect end to our day.  The girls had great fun colouring in spooky Halloween images for a colouring competition.  In the morning, we filled up with a brilliant cooked and continental buffet breakfast.

Because we had been away overnight for Halloween, we treated Lara and Holly to a little Halloween party at home.  They dressed up, we painted faces, lit candles in their pumpkins and even lit up sparklers in the garden.

Of course, we also treated the girls to a "dark party" in the living room where they could watch a little of their favourite TV.  This month Holly is very much into Charlie and Lola which is available on Netflix.  Lara is all over DinoTrux, a Netflix original series for kids by Dreamworks which features a world of dinosaurs made from truck-parts.

Mr. B. and I are continuing to watch Narcos which is spooky in its own special way - the brutal and bloody tales of the Columbian cocaine cartels is not the sort of show that you watch if you're looking for a light-hearted evening's viewing!