Gingerbread house night!

Last night was our Church's annual gingerbread house building night! After weeks of planning, days of ordering, shopping, and budgeting, hours of packing lollies, and many last minute jobs to complete - the night came together. Our car and house smelt like a lolly shop and bakery while our study became so packed with lollies and tablecloths you could barely move. This year was a lot bigger than last year: In 2014 we had 83 people attend, this year it was over 130! To give you an idea of what that is in reality, here are a few numbers:
I bought:
💮  19kg of bullets
💮 19kg of freckles
💮 50m of licorice
💮 1260 musk sticks
And the list goes on! We also packed over 700 individual bags of lollies and tied more twisty ties than I care to count! Anyway, here are a few photos from the night.  By the end of the night, we had raised about $800 for Missons. 

What 102 gingerbread houses flat packs look like

All set up, ready to go

Extra lollies and gingerbread men for sale

We had 16 tables, ranging from 6 to 13 people at each table

Decorating the houses!

Just starting to decorate...

 

We finished them off by dusting them in icing sugar and wrapped them in cellophane, tied with a ribbon

One of the 96 completed houses

Church Camp and Carols

Well, it has been awhile!  It is coming into Summer, into the Christmas season, towards the end of the year,  the times of cooler summer nights, while the days reach a delightful 40 or so degrees (no sarcasm - I love the heat  :)  )

Our annual church family camp was only a few weeks ago, and was heaps of fun.  It was held at Tahlee, so it was different for me to be actually participating in a camp, rather than cooking for it - although I did that too.  :) Our Church camp is rather relaxed and chilled, without much planned, so there is plenty of time to just hang out with each other fellowship.  I had been at Tahlee cooking all week leading up to the camp, so it was great fun to greet each new arrival as they trickled in over the course of Friday afternoon / evening.  The first thing that was planned on Saturday was indoor games in the morning, so we all met in the main auditorium where we played games such as  Ninja, Ship Shore Deck, Lifeboat and Capture the Flag.  the games were good fun, although I was in the yellow team, and we so totally lost.  ;) 

Afterwards, our Church has this unique tradition at camp where we do gumboot throwing competitions, I know, strange isn't it?!?  But anyways, it is actually more fun than what one would think.  We played in categories, preschoolers, primary aged girls, primary aged boys, high school girls, high school boys, then adults, both men and ladies.  It hadn't occurred to me that, seeing I finished school last year and had had a birthday since, I was actually in the open aged ladies competition, until we were lining up.  But, there I was.  So when it was my turn and picked up the boot and chucked it as far I could.  Some of the others had techniques and would spin the boot around and around before throwing up, gaining momentum, I guess.  Others would do a bit of a run up.  I just stood there and threw it, but it must have been the power of a left-hander, because, to my great surprise and shock, I won the ladies category with a throw of over 11 meters!  I won a bag of Freddo Frogs  :D

On Saturday night, Mum and I ran a Family Feud Trivia Night.  We had deliberated long and hard over this night, because a standard family feud game only includes 8 people (we had about a 100) and a trivia night would probably go over the younger kid's heads.  So, after quite a few brainstorming sessions, and a few late night calls on the week leading up to the camp while I was at Tahlee, we came up with a mixture.  During the afternoon, we set up tables in the auditorium, with 8-10 people at each table.  When everyone entered, they made teams at the tables.  Each table got to choose 4 people to come up to the front and play a Family Feud round (if you don't know what I mean by Family Feud, it is a game show on channel 10 - look it up!  :P)  Between each Family Feud round, there was bonus rounds, and each round accumulated points for an overall winning table of the night.  The bonus rounds varied from general trivia night quizzes, to quizzes on movie quotes, a don't forget the lyrics round (where we would play a segment of a song cutting it off part way and they had to write down the next lyrics)  and a few rounds especially for kids - including a spelling bee.  It was a really fun night and although Mum and I were both absolutely exhausted by the end of it, it was well worth the work and effort we had put in. 

Sunday morning we held Church by the lake, which was lovely, as usual.  the best thing was that this year - a first in the 5 years we have had Church camp - it didn't rain!  After the church service, we had water baptism in the lake and then a shared BBQ lunch.  It was a lovely time, and afterwards, it was time to go home.  I think at least 4 of us kids came home lobsters from the sun! :P

One last thing before I go, or you go, one or the other!  ;)

  It is coming, rather rapidly, up to our Church's annual Christmas Production.  The carols include a variety of singalong carols, song items, and drama.  If any of you are in the vicinity, and would like to come along - it is on the 6th of December, 2015, at Generate Church, corner of New England Highway and Kelso Street Singleton, NSW.  We have free entertainment - such as jumping castles, rock climbing, etc.  - from 3:30pm and dinner is available (I think it is something like hot dogs for $1.50 - but don't quote me on that!  :P)  - and  our cafe will be open, from where you can buy anything from a milkshake to a coffee.  The carols start 7:00pm, and finish at 8:30, so it doesn't go too late.  If you have any further questions or queries, please comment and I will do my best to answer them.  :)  We would love for you to be there if you can make it!!!
 

Farewell Rainbow Cake

A friend from our Church is going to England as an exchange student for six months - leaving today, actually!  So I was asked to bake a farewell cake for her at our youth group.  It was the first time I had done a farewell cake, so I hit google to try and find out which design to do.  In the end, this was what I ended up with....

Making the cakes:  I decided to make a rainbow cake.  Well, actually, everyone else decided that I should make a rainbow cake.  I was feeling tired and not too well, so I didn't feel like putting in the effort for a rainbow, so I went searching online for an easier way to make them.  I had made two different types of rainbow cakes before:  the first method is to place all your coloured batter in separate Ziploc bags, snip off the end, and put a drizzle in the bottom of the pan.  Then get the next colour, and repeat.  Continue until all the batter is used up.  This makes the cake come out in little stripes, like in the middle of this cake:

 The other method is to bake the cakes all separately and join them with together with icing later.  Although both methods work well, they are time consuming and I didn't have a lot of that.  So instead, I coloured each cake and poured them into the pan on top of each other, hoping that it wouldn't come out a nasty brown. 

These were my colours:  (I have seemed to lost one of the photos, there were 5 colours...  )

I poured the mixture in on top of each other.  And then tapped the pan several times on the bench to get rid of any air bubbles.  It took a loooong time to cook, and I probably had too much mixture in the pan, but anyways! 

 This is the mixture poured in - and then I swirled it just a little with a knife before cooking it (Right)





And this is after it is cooked: (I cut it open to fill it with icing and also to see how it worked out.)  I was happy - and relieved! - with the results.

 For the icing, I decided to try something new, as you do when you are cooking a cake for a event! :P I read that adding copha to the icing would make it set harder crust better to get a nicer finish.  I had to leave the copha out in the sun for about 9 hours before it was soft enough to be beaten up.  Here is the recipe:

It makes quite a lot of icing, well and truly enough to this cake, and I put a lot on!

Ingredients: 
500g butter
250g copha
1kg icing mixture
Splash of milk

Method:
Beat butter and copha together until fluffy and white.  Add icing mixture and beat well, scraping down the sides regularly.  Add milk if it needs to be a little thinner.  

Then I iced the cake blue, cut out fondant countries, and made a little plane.  I didn't get photos of the process, but here is the finished product: (the lighting isn't great, but by the end I really couldn't care less if the photos came out well :P)

70th Birthday Cake Days 4-5 & Elise's Birthday

So here is the last two days of the cake, a little late, but nonetheless, here it is...  :)

Day 4 - Covering and Spraying

Part-way through putting cocoa through the fondant - it took a long
time and boy did my wrists know it by the end!  :P

I had thought long and hard about how to make black icing.  You can buy pre-c
oloured fondant, but it is so much more expensive, and also it is a different brand, which can make a lot of difference if you are not used to working with it.  So, I was looking for some different options.   Although you can buy black food dye, it doesn't work because the icing is pure white, and so  you can only get a grey.  (The same happens with red, by the way.)  After doing lots of research, I finally came up with the following method, and hoped it would work...  When kneading the icing to make it pliable, I mixed in a lot of cocoa powder as well.  This gave the fondant a chocolate colour as well as flavour, which I thought was really nice.  To cover the cake, I used 1.5 kg of fondant.  I could have really used some more, as I found out later, but you can never truly tell until it is too late with these things!

After the Fondant is on.  If you look in the top of the left sleeve,
you can see the patchy icing job.  

Then I rolled out the fondant big enough to cover the cake.  I didn't take many photos of this phase, because I get in the zone of cake decorating, and don't think about much else while I am concentrating.  :)  To work out how big you need to roll the fondant, measure the widest part of your cake, plus the sides, and add a couple more centimeters all together and then roll out the fondant that large.  I  have a PVC pipe which I use to help roll out large pieces of icing.  When it is big enough, I rolled up the icing around the pipe, and then unrolled it over the cake.  Fondant is quite heavy and so you need to cut off the excess quite quickly otherwise it will tear over the corners.  Smoothing down the edges and pressing into the corners, I cut of the excess and used my fondant smoother to make sure it was lying as flat as possible.  Unfortunately. because of the extra cocoa powder, the fondant dried out a lot quicker than usual, and I had trouble getting it off the table and onto the cake.  This led to a rather dodgy icing corner on the cake, which we smoothed over as best as we could, but it still wasn't perfect.  The rest of the icing went on quite well.

Spray painting!!  :D

Then for the black!  I bought some Wilton Black colour mist, and literally spray painted my entire cake.  I used the whole can, and had to go back to the shops to get another one to cover some patchy areas.  But it worked quite well.  The spray takes a long time to dry, so I left it overnight.  The colour seemed to be a bit too brown at one stage in the drying process which had me quite concerned, but it darkened as it dried, to a nice black, which I was happy with.

This is just after I sprayed the cake.  It is a little patchy, which
I did fix up later, and you can see how the colour darkens later
on.

Day 5 - Decorating

The finished product!

The next day, I used both the paper map of the cake and the original picture to help me get the decorating right.  I coloured some fondant orange (using a mixture of red, black and yellow food dye) and let it to rest about half an hour.  Normally I colour the icing the day before, because it gives the fondant time to set again with the extra liquid in it, and also the colour can deepen with time.  But we had been too busy the day before, and I hadn't had time.

I cut out the white and orange pieces, and layed them onto the cake, arranging them until I was happy with the look.  Then I flipped the pieces of fondant over, and rubbed a little water on the back to make it stick, and then I was done!  (there are no photos of this process, because, once again, I was in the zone, and it is too hard to take photos while decorating.  :P)

 ~

The cake - it is not a particularly good photo,
because of the sun, but you get the idea.  

Saturday was also Elise's 13th Birthday.  She had a lovely day.  We opened presents in the morning, and she was most delighted with her Kindle Reader from Mum and Dad, and an assortment of other things from us kids.

Grace and I made her birthday cake.  It is Cinderella from the new movie which was only released a few days before her birthday, and consequently was also one of her birthday presents....

(A side funny story  :D...... When Grace and I were making the cake, we were having trouble getting the shape of the cake right (aka the skirt).  The doll we had bought was quite tall, and we had to build the cake up to make it proportionally accurate.  Then, after we had shaped it up, we had to cut a hole down the middle for the doll to sit.  However, that too proved to be difficult.  I cut down about half way, and then we had the bright idea of chopping the doll at the knees.  So, with no anesthetic, and a bread knife, our poor Cinderella became an amputee! :P)

Rosie waiting for the show to start, all dressed
up like a pirate.  :)

In the afternoon, we all went to see the stage show of Pirates of Penzance that Mum and Dad were playing in.  We had all been to see it at least twice before, but this time we had front row seats, and it never gets old.  I did take some photos, but was later told that photos weren't allowed, so unfortunately I won't post them....

That evening, Mum and Dad had another show, so we rushed home, had dinner, and then they left again.  Elise got to rediscover all her presents and answer the numerous phone calls!

Being the last show, Mum and Dad had to pack up the instruments and everything and then attend the presentations afterwards, which meant they didn't get home until about 1 am.  Dad and I had an early start at Church the next morning (we had to be there by 8:00 am) so we were all exhausted by the days end, but it was good.

Psalm 23 in Kid's Church

I have decided that my aim to post daily does not apply to weekends.  :P 

At Church, I run Kid's Church for the little ones - from ages 2 to 5.  Our group is called 'NewGen' because our Church is named Generate Church, so all the kids group, youth, music etc, all has the word 'Gen' in.  The primary aged group is named 'NextGen.' 

 When you have six children, all five and under running around, it can be hard to get a message across.  To illustrate my point... One day we were learning about Samuel and I had just given them the rundown on how God talked to Samuel when he was just a little boy, and how God talks to little children as well, that you don't have to wait until you are grown up to listen and obey God's voice and so on.  I finished and there was dead silence around the table, then one little girl piped up, "There's a pencil under the table!" Right..... glad you were all listening!  :P  

Some days they are really good and other days, I'm not sure they even heard the story, but I get encouraging reports from parents on how their kids were singing the songs, or talking about the stories, so I know it must go into their minds somewhere!  

This week, we were studying Psalm 23.  We had done this last week, but had run out of time to do the craft, so I decided that it wouldn't hurt to carry it over two weeks anyway.  Normally, I make a little slide show animation using Power-point where the story is animated with characters and scenery, and I read out the story as they act it out, like an Bible story book, only on the computer.  However, since we had done that last week, I hit YouTube to try and find another animation or something that I could play for them.  I found one little video made by some Kid's Church group where a little shepherd was singing the 23rd Psalm.  I really liked the animation, but did not like the song.  It was one of those high and squeaky, this-is-for-kids-so-let's-sound-like-kids-while-we-sing-it-and-don't-worry-too-much-about-pitch-either sort of songs, which I am so not in to!  But I couldn't find anything else, so I put the video into movie maker, stripped the audio from it, and layered Keith Green's version of Psalm 23 into it instead.  I had to remove some of the footage because it was too long, and also had to chop the instrumental out of the song to make the pictures line up, but in the end, it worked quite well.  I would post it, but I think it would be breaking copyright, so I won't...just in case.  :)

After we watched the video, and talked again about how a shepherd takes care of sheep, and God takes care of us, we did a colouring picture, and then made little sheep with Psalm 23 printed on them, like in the picture.  This was the picture which gave me the idea, although our sheep weren't quite as perfect, as 3-year-old's insist on putting legs in strange places!  But they were cute.  I was going to put cotton wool on their backs, but ran out of time....and glue.  So we didn't.  :)

So next week we are going to be doing Psalm 150. I'm thinking we could do a music day, and make instruments or something.... I  might even bring my violin in, although I haven't decided yet if I want to subject my violin to at least six pairs of eager hands.....

Psalm 150 here we come!!

A Musical Day

We had a busy day today, mostly centered around music.  Coming up this weekend, Joy, Elise and I have a violin eisteddfod.  It has been about four years since we have done one, so it should be good.

However, with only four days to go, the practice is getting rather.... shall I say, intense?  I haven't decided yet what songs I am going to play in each section, and don't really want to have to make that decision!

One of the songs I am learning - hoping to pull together for the weekend - is the theme from the movie Schindler's List.  It is such a beautiful song, so emotive and sad.... it also hits some really, really high notes, which are proving to be a challenge!  But hopefully, I'll get there.

See what I mean?  It would have to be one of my favorite violin songs.   I'm going to play quite a mix of modern and classical, because I have Rolling in the Deep (by the Piano Guys) and My Immortal (Evanescence), as well as Concerto in A minor, 3rd movement, and Concerto in G minor, 1st and 2nd movement, both by Vivaldi.  I have one more song than categories, so one will have to be dropped, but I haven't decided yet which one.  :)

I helped Rosie (just turned 5) with her violin practice today as well.  And yes, she had a peg on her bow.  This is to help her keep her bow on the strings and not run it off the end of the violin.
We had violin lessons today, and Rosie did really well - she is excited to be learning ' fingers' next week, a.k.a using the fingerboard to create more notes than just the open strings of G, D, A, and E.

Our teacher was pleased with the progress I had made with my songs, and if confident that I can pull them together, which makes me feel better about the whole thing, as I am feeling a little under prepared.

A couple in our Church do a nursing home outreach.  They go into the homes and perform concerts, mixing hymns, popular 70s songs which the old people would know, and Church songs together to meet them where they are at.  Emily, Joy, Elise and I are joining their concerts, and we went around after violin to run through our song.  We are just doing one this time, and have chosen 'Broken Vessels' by Hillsong.  Joy is playing guitar, Elise the violin, I am playing keyboard and everyone is singing.  We borrowed our Church keyboard, since we don't have one of our own, and it was so nice to play! It was my first time playing it, and I really enjoyed it.

I was trying to get a nice photo of Rosie, Annie, and James but this was the best I could get...
 Annie didn't want to stop for a photo because she didn't want her 'eyes to be bright' which I think meant she didn't like the flash.  And James wouldn't give me a proper smile, just a crazy pose.  :)