Throwing down the gauntlet

Last weekend Mr Teacakes and I took the children out for lunch as an 'end of the summer holidays' treat. After our main course I had a peppermint tea while the others chose desserts. I had hoped that Ian would choose something I would like from the menu so that I might steal part of it, but he chose the rather dreary sounding Hazelnut Bombe...when I enquired as to why someone would choose such a thing when there was a Honeycomb Cheesecake on offer he said it was the meringue centre that was tempting him. I was speechless that he would feel the need to choose the most boring dessert on the menu just to get a small morsel of meringue. But I could make you meringue, I said, any sort of meringue you could wish for (you see what a little success with one batch of pink meringues can do to a girl, an ego gone wild)! That was all the incitement Mr Teacakes needed to come up with a challenge. I would like a striped rainbow meringue please, he had said and later he added that he would like that meringue in the shape of a guitar (although he retracted that on the grounds of it being, in his opinion, impossible).

The children squealed with excitement when they saw this on the baking tray and reported back to their father that Mummy really was making stripy meringues. He refused to view anything until it was cooked and said he was dubious that it wouldn't all come undone in the baking...well, he was sort of right. Can you see that the yellow mixture looks a little runnier than the pink and the green? It did very strange things in the oven and quickly reduced to nothing but golden bubbles...however, my other attempts were judged to be a success:

...and we found that they were even more delightfully stripy when we broke into them.

I love these pistachio green ones too.

(and just in case you're worrying that the little Teacakes may actually be morphing into giant clouds of candyfloss with all the food colouring that I seem to splash about...I should say that we are hideously puritan when it comes to the children's diets...and that they are permitted what amounts to a couple of crumbs! As I hadn't had any dessert though...I was allowed many - yippeee!)

Other treats to end the summer holidays were trips to the swimming pool, a visit to some beautiful gardens, but best of all time in a deserted car park on Sunday afternoon. At the start of the summer I had made both children a chart in which they might collect stamps. For Zebra-girl stamps would be awarded for activities such as writing in a summer diary and for Dinosaur-boy playing alphabet games with me or learning to put his own coat on. Stamps were plentiful in every column, but for both of them the 'learning to ride my bike' (without stabilisers) column remained blank, in part due to a flat tyre that we hadn't gotten around to fixing. Which is why with only one day of the holidays left we felt compelled to spend an afternoon in a deserted car park. It wasn't long before Ian and I were able to stand in the middle and watch them both whizzing round us, Moose's antlers flapping gently in the wind as he rode pillion on Zebra-girl's bike. It is my happiest memory from the summer.

And now it is September and suddenly I am a stay-at-home mummy with no babies at home. Dinosaur-boy went off to school today looking so small and so delighted by the wearing of a school uniform....and I am so aware that with that comes the end of an era for me...but for today at least, in the company of friends, warming cups of tea, shared morning cake and a seat in my favourite cafe that didn't feel quite as painful as I had expected it might.