Our sculptural artworks
It’s been cold and wet recently and with another month or two of this sort of weather expected (we are in Scotland after all) I’ve been putting my mind to Creative and Fun Indoor Pursuits.
The other day we had run out of bread and the thought of taking three bedraggled children to the supermarket was too unpleasant to contemplate so this was my solution – we’d make our own dough balls…
I did use the breadmaker for this, by the way (recipe follows), but I also checked out this apparently easy recipe which I might try sometime with the children. It looks long but it does have video links to handy things like kneading. (Note to Self – do NOT try this for the first time on a day when we actually need bread…)
After I measured the ingredients out (I cunningly distracted the children with a snack for this – it can be done but generally at the expense of my sanity), it took 45 minutes for the dough programme to run.
Excitement reached fever pitch with sprinkling flour on the table and turning the dough out. Oldest made sausage shapes and twists; Middlest liked cutting it up with a knife and Youngest liked the flour the most. I enjoyed it too; I tried to make a little dough bird and got so involved in the task that I didn’t notice Youngest dragging a stool across the kitchen and finding a tin of cold baked beans, which she proceeded to eat with her hands.
It was a pretty messy business and the kitchen was covered in a fine snowfall of flour, so I got them all to stand on the kitchen table while I pretended to be a shark with the hoover. Don’t ask me quite how this worked but somehow it did.
All the children enjoyed it and an activity which grabs a 6 year old, a 3 year old and a 1 year old is not to be sniffed at. And best of all, we got to eat hot doughballs with lashings of butter while the rain lashed against the window panes.
Recipe for Focaccia dough
- 1/2 tsp yeast
- 300g strong white flour
- 1 tsp salt
- 1 tbsp olive oil
- 200ml water
Use ‘dough’ or ‘pizza’ setting on breadmaker. Ideally it should be left for 30 mins to rise after shaping but we were a bit hungry so…
Bake at Gas 5 / 190C / 375F for around 15 minutes, depending on the size of your creations.
