Settling In

I keep telling people that I must be feeling more settled as I have had time to do some baking this week.  I made a date slice with my Australian recipe and it didn't work out quite the same way with all purpose flour and baking powder instead of SR flour.  The next thing I made was orange muffins from a North American recipe website, the recipe called for baking soda and baking powder, I thought they were the same thing!  Anyway, the muffins turned out great.  Next week Cooper has a Christmas concert and party at Wee College and the boys in the class have to bring cookies.  There are lots of great cookie making moms here so I decided I would make ANZAC biscuits (according to Wiki ANZACS must be referrred to as biscuits, not cookies).  Now last time I made ANZACs (I think I was in high school) I made one big biscuit so I did a test run this week, these turned out great too so I hope the Candians like them next week.

One of the things that prompted me to bake this week was the arrival of our new coffee machine, we now have coffee with milk!  Yippee!  We are making the most of it, cappucinos and lattes at every opportunity.  In fact, one night we were making coffees after dinner in the kitchen so when Cooper told me he was going out to look out our inflatable Santa decoration, I said "ok".  A bit later on we could hear Cooper calling out, we thought he was watching TV in the basement and wanted the channel changed (he calls out from the basement all the time), so we didn't attend to him immediately.  Eventually Steve decided to go downstairs to change the channel and Cooper wasn't there!  As soon as Steve said that I remembered that Cooper said he was going outside.  I ran to the front door and there was Cooper, standing there in his gumboots and PJ's, tears rolling down his cheeks,  "I was locked out" he cried.  The poor little thing, I felt so sorry for him, it was snowing and he was so cold.  He actually did this again the next day and the lady across the road saw him from her front window and came across to let him in!

Our inflatable Santa, a distraction for Cooper.