This day I love.......: cook

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When your child makes a wish for Christmas you do your utmost to make their wish come true. Obviously when my youngest asked for Rudolph I had to use a little bit of creative imagination but for the most part I do my best to ensure their wishes are fulfilled.

This Christmas my eldest daughter had asked Father Christmas for a microwave, and not a toy microwave a real one. She has told everyone, including all the elves when we went to Wales and every time I have had a panic. It is not as easy as it sounds to fulfil this wish. She wants a real microwave, not a toy one. The problem for me is a 5 year old with a real microwave is a bad idea. I needed therefore to find a good alternative, one which looks real to her but is actually a pretend one.

I hunted everywhere for a real looking microwave and imagine my delight when I stumbled upon this one from Casdon

The Casdon Morphy Richards Kitchen Set Microwave, Kettle and Toaster had a look and feel of the real thing, which is exactly what I was after. The kettle can be filled with real water and the toaster comes with toast. The toast even pops up from the toaster like a real toaster. These were additional bonuses for my daughter, whose wish was a microwave.

The Casdon Morphy Richards Kitchen Set Microwave, Kettle and Toaster needs 3 AA batteries for the microwave to work and in order for the functions to work the door must be closed fully. The microwave has a thumb wheel which can be turned to select the item to be placed in the microwave. My daughters favourite is Pizza but there are others including Potato and Pasta. You can then press the numbers on the key pad which makes beep noises, same as a real microwave. Pressing start then activates the turntable, lights and cooking sounds of the microwave, in the same way a real microwave would.

The program can be stopped at any point by pressing stop. The girls find it really easy to open the door on the microwave too, thanks to the push button. My daughter was ever so happy when she opened up her microwave on Christmas morning and could not believe she had a real microwave.

I later asked her why she needed a real microwave, to which she replied 'to warm up all the baby food'. Seems she is excited for her new brother/sister to arrive!

The Casdon Morphy Richards Kitchen Set Microwave, Kettle and Toaster was sent for us to review in exchange for this post

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I was recently sent the Hotpoint Ovenspace electric single oven to review. I was looking for an oven the size of a single oven but with a large capacity. Having always had an electric oven I also wanted to stick with what was familiar.

The Hotpoint Ovenspace electric single oven has a 70l capacity. In comparison to others this is quite large, yet it has the same dimensions as an electric single oven and so fitted perfectly in the space of the previous oven. There was nothing complicated about installation, although I would recommend at least two people as it is a little heavy.

It has a beautiful mirrored finish which adds a touch of class into the kitchen. The majority of controls, including on and off, are touch buttons meaning the oven front is easy to wipe clean. Upon switching the oven on you hear a beep and the panel illuminates in a soft orange.

I found the panel very user friendly, by using the control to the left I can scroll through menu options. I like that there is an auto cook function for meat, bread and cakes. I haven't yet tried these out but love the recipe included in the instruction book for bread.

Other than looking sleek, modern and stylish the Hotpoint ovenspace electric single oven is rather clever. It features a rather clever divider.

The divider allows you to separate the oven into two, creating two smaller cooking spaces. You can choose to cook with or without the divider in place. This means you save on heating the whole oven, if you only wanted to cook one dish. This saves time, for pre heating, and also money. The divider is much smarter than this. It also prevents smells crossing it. This means you can cook both a savoury dish and a desert at the same time. Each section within the divider can be set to different temperatures. Which means no more waiting for one thing to cook before cooking the next.

There are also some great safety features including audible beeps to alert when switched on, and if the divider unit is in place. The trays feature grooves so that they do not keep sliding and fall out the oven, there is a gentle lift to them.

I have been really impressed with the Hotpoint Ovenspace Electric single oven. It not only looks fantastic but in my opinion is fantastic. I am still trying to figure out how they can make a single oven do so much without taking up more space.

Whilst I was sent a Hotpoint Ovenspace to review, all words and opinions are my own.

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It is my youngest daughters first pancake day and one which my eldest has seen lots about pancakes and has asked me all day if she can flip them. Not wanting to disappoint I made some special pancakes with her so we could flip pancakes together and have a pancake race.

We started by drawing around one of her toy saucepan lids on some felt:

Whilst my Mum and the girls drew the pancakes and cut them out, I was cutting up small rectangle pieces of pink felt to represent ham, some purple and red splat shapes to represent jam, some yellow strips to represent lemon, and some yellow dots for honey. I had silver glitter for sugar and some shredded yellow tissue paper to represent cheese. By which point I had run out of other things to put on pancakes other than chocolate, but had no appropriate coloured felt for this.

My daughter then put each pancake in her frying pan went to her play cooker and cooked them, flipping the pancakes as she walked back over to the table.

The really fun part came next as we decorated each of our pancakes. It was great to hear my daughter using her imagination 'I need more ham for this pancake please Mummy' or 'Lets put more sugar on this pancake Grandma'.

When we had finished decorating the pancakes, my daughter wanted to see how high we could flip them.

The downside of flipping a pancake with glitter on is that glitter goes everywhere including on the dog

I really love that these pancakes can now be used as play food in her pretend kitchen and she can continue to play with them.

For the girls dinner I made them pancakes, well how could I not. I decided to make rainbow shape pancakes. I made a simple batter mixture, 110g plain flour, 2 eggs, 200ml milk, 75ml water, 50g butter and pinch salt, mixed together. I then separated into 7 separate bowls and added food colouring. I added enough colouring until I got the colour I wanted. I thought about crushing strawberries for the red, blueberries for the blue and other fruits for the other colours unfortunately I did not get chance to do it this way but may do next year.

I made sure the pan was nice and hot and then placed into the pan a metal cookie cutter shape.

I spooned batter into each of the shapes and then quickly and carefully removed the cutter. [I had plastic shape cutters but figured they would melt in a hot pan, and I had to carefully remove the meta shape cutter as they got hot quick!] If you leave the cutters in the pan too long the batter sticks to the sides and becomes really hard to get the pancake out in one piece.

I did this for each of the different colours until I had done them all. I then plated up my rainbow stars for each of the girls

The girls really loved the shaped pancakes and the different colours, I could have stacked them but I think it would have looked to big to eat for my girls. My eldest daughter loved talking about the different colours and offered a pink star to her sister.

This day I love a day of pancakes and glitter.

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