School Lunches
Where on earth did the summer holidays go? I hear you wondering.
School is back and if you are anything like me, you will start off school lunches with a hiss and a roar, preparing and presenting your kiddoes with a perfect healthy lunch each day. Then all the activities start back up and work and home life get mega busy again and things start to slide……..
I set aside some time on a Sunday to do a wee bit of baking for the school lunches and it always makes me feel better if they are going to school with something without hundreds of added preservatives in them.
If you simply don’t have the time for hours in the kitchen then I have found a couple of quick yummy recipies which always go down well with my lot. You might recognise them as a couple of classics, one is taken straight from the good old Edmonds cookbook.
The first recipe is ‘Cheese Biscuits’, which are a delicious light little fluffy bite and the cheese gives them added calcium and protein, perfect for eliminating that soggy mid-day lunch cheese that has been sitting in their lunchbox in the heat. And if you cut them into cute little shapes they will fit into their containers nicely and make the perfect little snack.
For this recipe we gathered together 1 cup plain flour, 1 tablespoon icing sugar, 1 teaspoon baking powder, a pinch of salt, 25g butter, 1/2 cup grated cheese (cheats tip: buy the ready grated cheese for an even quicker bake) and 3-4 tablespoons of milk. If you like a little bite add a pinch of cayenne pepper to the mixture before mixing.
We sifted all of the dry ingredients into our bowl and cut the butter in (if you have a food processor, chucking it all in this to blend the butter in quickly is a fantastic speedy solution). Then you just need to mix in the cheese and milk to form a stiff dough, this can also be done in the food processor or by hand. Pop it out onto your floured board, roll out to around a couple of cms thick and get your coolest cutters out until you have used up the whole mixture. They then go on a greased or lined tray, prick each with a fork to look like biscuits, then pop into a 200 C oven for 10 minutes until lightly golden.
If you use small cutters these can make quite a few, trust me, your kids will love them!
Our second recipe I’m sure all of you will be familiar with, is Rice Bubble Slice.
The ingredients for this are all placed into a medium size saucepan, making sure you leave room for the rice bubbles to be stirred in at the end. They are 115g butter, 4 tablespoons of sugar and 2 tablespoons of honey. If you don’t fancy taking out a mortgage at this stage for the honey you can substitute for golden syrup and it works just as well, just maybe reduce the amount of sugar to around 3 tablespoons to avoid it being too sweet.
We just melt these ingredients until they are golden and bubbly and take off the heat and stir in 4 cups of rice bubbles. Pat the mixture flat into a rectangular brownie tray which is lined with baking paper, makes it much easier to remove later when it’s ready to eat. Pop the tray into the fridge until it is set and all you need to do is slice it into squares to eat. Easy as that!
I hope your family enjoys these little treats and I would love to hear your suggestions for some quick lunchbox bakes. Thank you for joining me again and please come back again to visit soon.
Scanning through I saw that even though the recipe was two-thirds of the page instruction wise, it doesn’t contain too many ingredients. You will need eggs, castor sugar, flour, butter, milk and water. The recipe is divided into two sections, the cake and the icing, and it pays to read through before starting. There is a variation note which suggests you could make this up as one Gateau or multiple petite fours, I thought why not grease and flour a few more pans and go for the smaller cakes. If you’re going to put in the work why not go the whole hog. 😁
