Easter Rocky Road Nests

Hmm, impressively I have been so outstandingly lazy, that a whole year has passed without any posts!

In that time, I have had a baby, taken her and her brother to watch the Olympics and Paralympics, been made redundant, had influenza, and started training as a breastfeeding counsellor - so not been up to much really!

So I think I'll start with a ridiculously lazy Easter 'recipe' - this is not really a recipe, it is more a way to keep a 3 year old occupied, and make something with chocolate for me to eat.

Rocky Road Nests

You will need:

some chocolate - we used about 150g milk chocolate.

a tablespoon of butter

a tablespoon of chocolate spread

2 digestive biscuits

a mini pack of cereal (we used cornflakes, as O found a mini box of them in the cupboard and wanted to play with them)

some other stuff - we used

a handful of raisins

a handful of mini marshmallows

half a tube of smarties

To make these:

Melt the chocolate/butter/chocolate spread in a microwave - 30 seconds, stir, then 10 second bursts until it's smooth.

Stir in the cereal and other stuff (you could add nuts, white chocolate chunks, glace cherries, chopped dried apricots, maltesers, broken up pretzels - basically whatever you find in the cupboards).  break up the biscuits into chunks and stir them in too.

Spoon a dessert spoon of the mixture in to cupcake wrappers in a cupcake or muffin tin, and try to make them vaguely nest shaped with the spoon.

Chill them in the fridge until set, then stick a mini chick or some mini eggs in them to serve.

Try not to eat them all before the 3 year old tries one!

An Introduction

I am just about the laziest person I know.

If I can find a shortcut, I will take it.

If I can avoid doing something altogether, I will do so.

However, I do need to eat, as do my husband and child, so I have been developing some supremely lazy meals to make life easier for me.

By lazy, I mean as little washing up as possible, as little preparation as possible, and the maximum output possible - so if I make something that can be divided into portions for the freezer? So much the better!

I do work (part time - 5 days a week at the moment, but not full days), and some evenings we will have frozen pizzas, when I just cannot deal with preparing a meal. However, most nights, my husband (J), son (O), and I, will sit down to a home-cooked meal, and chat about our days.

As O is only 2, and we have another child on the way, we have to balance eating healthily with eating at all (O is a notoriously picky eater when he's tired, which is pretty much always, and I have had such bad morning sickness for the past 6 months, that many of our meals have been bland, bland, bland). I have to cook in the hour between getting home from work, and O reaching that point in the evening where he is hungry enough to eat, but not too tired to sit still - so 4.30pm at the moment.

I have several types of recipe:
1. quick (15-20 minutes from start to finish)
2. advance (all prep done at the weekend when J can deal with O)
3. vegetable vehicles (a meal that hides vegetables in it, so J will eat them)
4. snack (quick and easy snacks)
5. puddings (dessert, basically)
6. baked goods (predominantly cake, sometimes cookies, occasionally pies)

Some of these will be suitable for a toddler to help with. Some won't. I'll be sure to mark each one to make sure it's obvious which ones are small child friendly!

Hopefully over the next few weeks/months I can build up a catalogue of easy to follow recipes which can be cooked during an episode of Peppa Pig (or, less optimistically, during an episode of Bob the Builder!), or which can be cooked with the assistance of a small child.