Want to see some Easter craft?

Ok then. Below you shall find the boys making tiny hot cross buns from Nigella’s recipe, but doubled, because I thought that everyone would love them because they would be fragrant and soft and warm and buttery and better than the shops, and of course if you make your own hot cross buns when you are a child then you are bound to want to eat them, because that is what the Annabel Karmel-type people tell you. They say the same with salads, I think. Anyway, no one ate them but me, so for days and days I dutifully heated up two for breakfast and broke into the burnt sugary crust with my little enamel-deficient teeth, wondering why they were so little and hard and doughy. It’s a baking mystery, I tell you. Also, those boys no doubt had very bottomy hands when they mixed up the dough and I will have eaten all the bottomy-hands residue, for sure, but I am my mother and father’s daughter (obviously) and I don’t let a thing go to waste. Especially when the thing has been proving for days and I went so far as to infuse the milk with cardamom pods and orange zest. Honestly.

Then we boiled eggs in vinegar and gel pastes but it didn’t work: all it did was turn the brown eggs kind of darker brown, so we blew out some other eggs and painted them in acrylic and Tiger stickers. And I made a massive pot of scrambled eggs with the blown-out innards but I didn’t have any, because of the communal spit. To be fair, I had my share of bottom-hands, as above.

I do try, I really do. See the bowl of blown eggy insides and collateral fluids just waiting to be turned into a wholesome thrifty breakfast for my beloved brood. HAHA, SHE CACKLES!

And then on Saturday we went to Portobello where we found people dressed as vegetables who were attempting to get the 5 A Day message across to the impoverished Notting Hill kids (*eye roll*) with such inventive means as Make a Fruit Kebab and Eat It, and Throw a Bean Bag at a Stuffed Fabric Vegetable to Win A Sticker. Excellent fun and good intentions all round, but surely this is preaching to the converted? To the privileged converted? This is Clean Eating Central, after all, with some very stupid-looking new restaurants popping up all over the neighbourhood recently, all screaming about their clean virtues. So, we already get it, Giant Benevolent Veges:

But, you know, there were balloons and I did finally work out how to use boomerang:

So that was Easter. Also we had a hunt in the communal garden, but the hailstorm interrupted things and then when it got nice again, the other families got there first and so we had to wait for them to find their own eggs before we invaded the garden with ours. My kids still think the Easter Bunny hides theirs, so it got a bit tricky with the complicated subterfuge and then when they went for the hunt, they found eggs that I hadn’t hidden. Which meant that they were from the other families, but I wasn’t sure how to tell them that M’s mother must have hidden that one, because our Easter Bunny only had eggs that were from the Pound Shop – it was all a bit close to shattering their childhood innocence. So we just let Ned take an enormous expensive rabbit and we really hoped M and his sister hadn’t seen Ned traipse out from under the bushes with their massive bunny. Later we saw M and his sister searching under the same bushes but it all felt a bit too little, too late.

So in other news, I went out to Electric House with Liz on Tuesday, who is always gorgeous and cool,and she was wearing the most excellent jumpsuit and, upon inquiry, I found out it was Carhartt – proper workwear cotton, all stiff and sleek and fitted. She wore it with her curly hair to the side with a magical assortment of necklaces which never seem to get tangled, like she has some necklace untangling spell, and it was unbuttoned and sexy and I swooned. So we ate and talked and drank Negronis, but really, for the evening, and the next day, even though I was ostensibly doing other things, my mind was like this:

And so I could stand it no longer and I ordered a pair of my own. Because I am impulsive and a bit obsessive.

OK I have to go because the kids are watching Goosebumps and they are probably terrified and they very well might start down a path of trauma and teenage badness unless I take them outside and away from early 90’s crap TV.

I hope your Easter was ace and your buns were edible.