I am afraid that R is not a very talented artist. His effort is the one with the Beanie and googlie eyes on the left of the picture. He says it is either one of the characters from South Park, or a Flump.

My mother is a talented artist, and her egg was most definitely unusual. It went through a couple of incarnations as a snow scape and a bloodstained bandage before acquiring a comb, legs and a beak and becoming a cockerel. It also acquired a butterfly and some flowers, so it is a 1960s groovy chick. In case you couldn’t guess, it is the one on the right.

Mine is the bunny rabbit with the cotton wool tail and giant carrot.

I had myself down as the winner before I suddenly decided to concede victory before I was eaten by the final contestant. Here is great Cthulhu himself as made by my brother N, complete with tentacles which look suspiciously as though they might have come off a certain mohair rug belonging to my father.

Actually they were all great – here they are together.

Many thanks to my parents for a lovely weekend. I just realized I left you all the hot cross buns I made yesterday.

This afternoon I baked some hot cross buns from the BBC recipe. They were a bit more involved than I had thought they would be (three separate proves) but they turned out great, apart from my parents’ oven being a bit hotter than I am used to, so a couple got a bit over done. Also I didn’t have a piping bag to put the cross on. I will try one toasted with butter for Easter Sunday breakfast.

I love baking but I am constantly trying to be healthy and not to put weight on, so I am not so fond of eating the results (or rather I am but I would rather not), so I always bake something for my Mum and Dad. This time it is Mary Berry’s Simnel cake and Easter biscuits. The biscuits are very nice (I have to admit I did sample one), but the cake is a little overdone around the edges. I swear I baked it at the right temperature, and actually for 15 minutes less than the recipe said – so sadly I suspect that my oven is over hot in places. This year I am going to look at getting a gas range – afraid that for all it looks as though it was monstrously expensive, I am less than enamoured with the Britannia range I inherited with the house.

The cake was supposed to have crystalized primroses on it – but unfortunately the ones in my garden aren’t quite out yet.

The mixture

Adding an internal layer of marzipan

The baked result

Finished article with biscuits

I made my Dad a birthday cake (a sort of Simnel cake decorated with real crystallized primroses from our garden here) and my Mum an Easter egg basket.

The eggs were raw ones – I inserted the point of a sharp knife in the small end – just sufficient to lift out a tiny piece of shell. Then I broke away more tiny pieces to make a hole the size of a five pence piece and drained the contents (for consumption). I washed them out, filled them with mini chocolate eggs and then sealed the hole up with a disk of waxed paper. Half of them I painted blue and stuck gold stars on, the other half I painted gold. The little box in the centre had originally had chocolates on it, so I painted it, decorated it with shells and refilled with chocolates. Finally I gave everything a coat of varnish, put it all in a basket and topped it with a couple of M&S decorated eggs. Quite pretty…