 Hello and welcome to a healer home today's video is the Easter weekend vlog where in I share with you the things that I got up to during the Easter break. We were so excited about Easter because it had been quite a long term and the children were in school right up until the Thursday before Good Friday so when Friday arrived we were all so happy and really looking forward to the break. One of the things that we always do at Easter is make hot cross buns and once you've made hot cross buns by yourself at home you will never go back. I will link the recipe quantities in the description box down below if you wanted to try out this recipe for yourself but basically I warm up the milk to about 40 degrees Celsius and then I will activate the yeast by adding the yeast and some of the sugar from the full quantity of sugar that's going to go into the buns and I will leave it to activate for about 10 minutes covered over with a tea towel just on the kitchen counter. There are many steps involved in making the hot cross buns but it doesn't feel that long because I tend to do things in between the processes so on this day I also went out to what are the seedlings that I'm growing in the greenhouse. I currently have two sets of seedlings growing at the moment there's one set that's growing in the house on the south facing windowsill and then I have this set that's growing outside in the greenhouse. Our greenhouse is not fully protected so the ones that are in the greenhouse are the ones that are a bit more hardy the ones that can survive some fluctuations in temperature and they can survive the blusteriness because there are some windowpains that are broken where in the wind comes through so in that regards it does make it a lot faster for them to be ready for final planting unlike the ones that are inside the house and the ones that are inside the house are also the ones that the children have sowed and that's so that they can look after themselves they can water them and do all the bits and bobs. This is a lot of fun. A good Friday weather I wish it had been much sunnier but it was on and off sometimes it was raining and when it was raining the pond looked very pretty because I find the site of raindrops rippling across the surface of a pond to be one of the most calming sites that I enjoy to see. Our Camellia bush is still going strong it's in its second month now of blooming and it was a lovely little 10 minutes to spend in between the hot crossbind making so once the yeast is activated and you tell that it is actually active it will have a little bit of a form on the top of it and then making the rest of the hot crossbinds it's very easy because you just pumpkin all of the rest of the ingredients the caster sugar the bread flour the sultanas the ground cinnamon the old spice the orange zest I didn't have any orange zest so I actually just used orange essence the melted butter and the salt and the vegetable oil and again I will put the quantities in the description box down below this is such an easy one to make and if you have a bread mixer or you know one of those mixes that have the dough hook you can use that and it would make it even faster but I went good old-fashioned in this one I do love kneading dough I find that to be a very satisfying thing to do and basically just mix everything together it will start off feeling sticky at first but that's perfectly fine it is supposed to be initially a sticky dough but the more that you need it and the more that you work it and the gluten strands lengthen it will come together and it will eventually become quite smooth and silky so don't worry about the stickiness and when you are kneading it try and avoid adding too much flour because that will mess up the flour to water ratio or flour to milk ratio in this case and that can cause a denser bun which is not as tasty so I started off with some flour but not added much more beyond that after about 10 minutes of kneading as you can see it's come together and it's quite nice and smooth so I'll just form that into a ball and then I will put it into a lightly oiled bowl because I don't want the dough to stick inside and then I'll cover it over with some cling film and then I'll leave this one for its first proofing in the oven at 40 degrees Celsius and I just went off and I got on with doing some chores cleaning the house and then 40 minutes earlier it had sorry 40 minutes later it had doubled in size and once that has happened just lightly kneaded again just to knock some of those air bubbles out and at this point it's so satisfying because it's so nice and smooth and feels very silky and then after this it's just a matter of forming the buns themselves so I try to use my hand to determine the size because you can go as big or as small as you want to you could even make a hot cross bun loaf if you wanted to or a tea loaf and yeah and so it's just cutting those if you wanted to be more accurate about it you could use a scale in order to get exact measurements but I just sort of eyeball it and then I just sort of cut my hand and roll them my dad taught me how to do this which I'm so grateful for it it also reminds me a lot of my dad when I'm making these buns and and yeah and then just put those into the baking tray which I've lined with the baking parchment and then these are going to go for another second proofing I cover it over with some oiled cling film and that's because I don't want when they rise they will come up against the cling film and I don't want them to stick to the cling film and then when you remove them it sort of ruins the lovely bun shape that they have so I always just put a little bit of oil on the cling film cover them over and then put them in the oven again at 40 degrees celsius and they'll go in there for another 40 minutes or so and then they'll be ready to go while those are proofing I'm just going to go out and do a little bit of gardening I had to buy some more dahlia's yesterday so I have this lovely red one the mixed ones and that's because the ones that I planted last time the ones that I put into the ground I've been reliably told that they probably will not survive the frost I wasn't supposed to put them in the ground I was supposed to put them in a pot in the greenhouse so I'm trying to rectify that mistake I also got some more mini-sized propagators because I have a lot more seeds that I need to sow out and I also picked up some more sweet peas some more marigolds I can't resist and my son wants to grow sweet peppers so we're gonna be sewing out that with him I also got these ones the seedling tray because there's some that now need to be moved over into they've germinated and they need to be moved over into those and I also got more of the seed and cutting compost it's a lot finer which would be a lot better for the seeds so I'm just gonna go and do that whilst I'm waiting for the hot cross buns to for the dahlia's I'm just using a normal ordinary compost I'm saving the seed cutting compost for the sowing off the seeds and before I plant them I have to check each of the dahlia bulbs the tubers rather sorry dahlia's have tubers not bulbs to make sure that they've got some eyes and eyes are basically where you can see a tiny little bud coming through and sometimes when you're buying the tubers from the chain shops like I did with B&Q sometimes the quality is not necessarily guaranteed so I wanted to make sure that I was planting tubers that had a very high chance of actually sprouting and so I labeled them as well because I wanted to be able to keep on top of exactly what variety was what and I put those into the greenhouse and then moving on to the seeds I use vermiculite mixed in with the seed sowing compost and that is the base that I use and over the years I've found that it's the best way to grow the seed the vermiculite helps to hold more water more moisture and it's also very very light so it doesn't cause it doesn't make it too hard for the seeds to germinate for the smaller seedlings like lobilia I will put some sharp sand over them and so here they are in the little propagators that I got from B&Q which I'm absolutely loving because they are small and portable and easy to move and we use this self-facing windowsill for the seedlings that were growing indoors so you can see over there those are the ones that my children did a couple of weeks ago and they've already sprouted but because they're on a wind seal and they respond to the direction of the light every day we have to be constantly rotating them so that they grow straight up rather than bending towards the light so now that that was 40 minutes that took me about 40 minutes to do and it was just in time for me to get the hot cross buns out of the oven to work up the oven temperature to 180 degrees and whilst the oven was getting up to temperature we were working on doing the iconic cross because obviously they're hot cross buns and I'd already made the mixture of it's simply a mixture of flour and water and you put it into a piping bag and then you pipe the crosses some people prefer to use scissors to just snip the crosses on the top so you don't actually have the white line across but you've got the shape of the crosses achieved by cutting in and it was at this point that my daughter wanted to jump in and help because they had walking up it was the first day of their holiday and so they took the chance to slip in as much as is possible and how wonderful it was and they just need to bake for about 25 to 30 minutes in an oven at 180 degrees mine is fan-assisted and afterwards just glaze them with a sugar water to give them that iconic hot cross bun glaze and these oh my days are so delicious they are so good particularly with some butter and the kids loved them and everybody loved them so much that within five minutes of them coming out of the oven they were all gone with people asking for more but I like to keep them keen because absence makes the heart grow fonder so I don't make too much of them so that they do remain special and they come out so fluffy and they're so easy to make and as I said once you go homemade with the hot cross buns you will never go store-bought again and they are so easy to make and they come together so quickly as I said they were finished within five minutes of them being out I didn't even get a chance to put them on a presentation platter everybody just was nom nom and then after I'd done that I also decided that it was the perfect day to work on a sewing machine that I had recently purchased from an auction I love vintage sewing machines I just love how they work I love the engineering and the ingenuity of the Victorians that invented the sewing machines and I love the fact that most of these machines are nearly 100 years old sometimes even older but they still work just as well as they did when the first came off of the factory line when I actually bought this machine at an auction I was actually buying it to get the motor I a few months ago I bought another machine which is a Faf 11 and it's a hand crank machine but I wanted to convert that one into a motorized machine so I was looking for a machine that I could just get motor off of so when I bought this one I didn't know what condition it was in I just knew that it had a motor but then I was very pleasant to surprise after I collected it because the auctions are online so you don't really get to see the items beforehand that it was in very good condition it's a 99k and by the way you can tell when your machine was made by looking at that serial number and looking it up on a single website but the decals which are the little gold trims around the base were just in perfect nick and everything was just looking really good and so I basically decided that I wasn't going to take it apart and harvest it for the parts like I had planned to but that I was going to restore it and actually use it because it is in such good condition so once I've finished wiping off the amounts of dust that normally accumulate from them being kept in the attic or in the garage or something like that and then have to go into the inside bits and just open up the face plate and I'll use my little bits and bobs of equipment that I've gathered over the years to remove the lint and dust that accumulates on the inside I love restoring the machines and bringing them back to working order in terms of difficulty of restoration this is probably one of the easier ones it was more of a cleaning up cosmetic job unlike some of the more complex ones that I've done in the past where I've had to take apart everything and put it all back together but it is a lot of fun and these things were made to last and they're just incredible pieces of machinery the other thing that I also like to do is to oil them using sewing machine oil and that's because if you use any other type of oil it's really not good for them so if you do have a sewing machine and you're thinking you haven't oiled it in a in a bit always making sure that you use the Singer machine oil and I know because I've tried to use the 3-in-1 oil and that was never a good idea and so once that is done it was a mellow screw in the face plate back on and one thing that I have found is with these old machines is that I never have to ask the kids to come and help out they just become naturally interested in them because they have so many moving parts that are visible it's not a like a lot of the modern technology that we have now where you don't see the moving parts you know if you're on a smartphone or if you have a coffee maker you just press a button and then everything just goes but the kids really find the machines fascinating because they see all the gears and the cogs moving and they always end up coming in saying oh can we help maybe can we help it and they help it it's it's it's a lot of fun so on this one I'm on the under bed which is where quite a lot of the action happens so to speak and for these if they've been sat for decades not being used they need to be given a lot of extra oil so ordinarily for just a normal maintenance oiling I wouldn't be putting this much in but because this hasn't been used for decades I would say possibly even close to about 40 years I would say it hadn't been used given the amount of lint that I then found in the bogging case but yeah so it's basically the equivalent of trying to give them an oil bath but not quite an oil bath and then just without taking it apart so for a more complex restoration if something wasn't in as good condition as this I would be taking all of that apart but in this case it wasn't necessary so I was using my tools to try and get some of the lint that stuck between the feed dogs and bobbing case and it's very satisfying when you begin to pull out the lint I don't know it satisfies the OCD in me I guess when I'm going around and pulling out bits of fluff from near impossible places and I have to use things like toothpicks or tweezers it's a lot of fun but once all of that stuff is cleared out the machine was running beautifully and yeah I can't wait to use it for I can't wait to use it for a project and it's really nice during the holidays particularly the holiday days because that seems to be the only time nowadays that I have to be able to to do any of this restoration stuff which is a lot of fun the case of this singer 99k had sections where things were coming off some of the fabric threads on the finishing were coming off so my daughters were using some wood glue to sort of stick them back on and yeah they have fun doing things like this they have their own vintage sewing machines that they were re that they helped to restore and their hand crank ones that they sew on and so it's wonderful after that I had to put them out in the sun for the case and the base to dry out because as I say the weather on Good Friday was very very capricious it was going on and off with the sun but at least we were able to use the sun to actually dry out the machine and I'm showing you there is part of our Easter crafts and adding to our Easter decorations dash we got these lovely little eggs from little and we were using my daughter's paint kids to paint them into fancy little Easter eggs that will be used for deco for decorating stuff and there's my daughter using some of the watercolors having a go at it it was it was a fun activity to do we always try and do a lot of crafty activities together but I needed to move on to do some more stuff with the gardening and that involved the that involved the propagator kits that I got where I needed to transfer to transfer the seedlings into bigger ones the nice thing about the wood blue I think what I'm trying to show there is that it was drying pretty quickly and it just looked a lot neater also had the boys do some seed sowing as well so the problem with these ones was that they didn't have any drainage holes which I found quite annoying I thought I'd got them at a good price but it turns out is because they didn't have any drainage holes but not to worry I got my husband on it using the drill to drill some drainage holes in burgers it's very important and these ones were going to take the sunflowers which had grown up and they needed to be moved over but as well as the peas the sweet pea plants that I had pre germinated by putting into a Tupperware container with a wet towel at the bottom and I pre germinate them because that way I'm not wasting a cell to a duff seed because unfortunately that's a fact of life some of the seeds will sprout and germinate and some won't so if you pre germinate things like sweet peas which are easier to pre germinate than other things then you can kind of get a more efficient success rate so to speak and so when I'm picking them up I'm just picking them up very very gently and then putting them roots down into the little cells and then I'll water them and they'll go back into the house to continue growing sweet peas are one of those that are very frost tender so these ones cannot go out until all threats of frost are completely gone so they'll probably be going out into the ground somewhere around the 15th of May I've been keeping a calendar that records when the last frosts were and for the last five years in our garden we've never had frost beyond the 15th of May the latest we've ever had frost was the 15th of May so now anything that is frost tender I will only plant it out after the 15th of May because each garden each individual garden varies in terms of how sheltered it is and you have a microclimate over there so you can't necessarily just base it on what the weather is in your particular region you kind of have to learn what your garden does and how it protects the flower the plants that you have in it so yeah so these ones will stay safe and secure either in the so they'll start off in the house first of all and then I will move them into the green house as the weather gets continues to get warmer and then I'll move them into a cold frame on the patio to prepare them before putting them in the garden and I'm primarily growing the sweet peas because I love the cut flowers they are so pretty and they are so beautiful so I may have gone a little bit overboard with the sweet peas I've got about a hundred of them currently growing but I do love the flowers they really are beautiful and I got a lot of different varieties as well that I'm excited to try out because I would really love to be able to narrow down on a very specific variety that I can say oh yeah this is the one that I grow every year and it's reliable so some of it is experimentation but there is a lot of fun to be had from growing things and sowing seeds I definitely love that as part of stepping into spring that there's a lot more growth about and we can participate in it the garden is definitely waking up the blue bells have sent off the little spires and we're waiting for the blue bells to actually come out and populate the areas is very very exciting and in the pond so much is happening now the mash merry golds which tend to go to sleep during winter and there's only a few leaves about have just exploded and the yellow is so vibrant it's not like the yellow of the daffodils as well it is a really punchy yellow that looks so lovely against the greens and I honestly can't believe how these grow and they've definitely become one of my favorite water flowers aquatic plants because they're so pretty and the forget-me-nots are just coming out in profusion everywhere with their little winking yellow centers I love forget-me-nots and what I really love about them is that I can't actually control them they don't like being moved and they self seed and I've learned that the hard way basically and so they're just like a lovely gift from nature I got carried away trying to sort out the patio because I hadn't done a patio clean and I lost track of time completely so this is a task that wasn't planned for the day but because towards the early evening the weather sort of turned and it was a bit more bearable outside despite how blustery it was but everything in the garden is waking up and it's very exciting it also makes me feel like my sap my juices are rising up as well and yeah it was just a lovely lovely day throughout we finished off the evening by having some pizzas on the Friday night rather than the Saturday night since it is the holidays and the children didn't have any activities that they had to go to I went to Aldi to get some last-minute items and I found all of these flowers were reduced to clear 50% off so I got loads of them I thought I did the most amazing painting on this black and white printed thing that we had for the Easter menu and I just think that it is so the energy that fresh flowers bring in the house and so I'm always on the lookout for picking up the flowers particularly if they're on special offer it is such an extra it gives an extra special feel to my frugal mentality and I'm using some vases I prefer clear vases because it's easy for me to see that the water has gone down and that it needs to be replaced I have no formal training in flower arranging though it's one of those things on my bucket list is something that I would love to do probably once the children have flown the nest I'll be signing up for I don't know some local night classes or something like that because I do love flowers but I don't always think I'm necessarily good with the flower arrangements so another thing that I like to do is I like to refresh older arrangements so I had an older arrangement that had been around for nearly three weeks because it's made out of chrysanthemums and chrysanthemums they do last a long time and I basically took those out washed the vase clean again and filled it with some fresh water and went through all of the old flowers and got rid of the ones that weren't we're sort of past their prime as you can see that a trick that I like to do is cutting off the leaves because normally the leaves are the ones that die out and show signs of a flagging first before the petals do and so I'll tend to just cut those out to refresh the flower arrangement in that extends the time period that you have it for and yeah so with this one I had lilies I normally don't have lilies because of the pollen you know the stamens they produce so much pollen and we wear a hay fever house hay fever is something that was trouble with but I decided to get them because I really really wanted lilies for Easter and I just made a note to myself that every morning I would be cutting off as each flower opened I would be cutting off the stamens to make them more allergy friendly and as I'm recording this the flowers are still open and still going and it's been wonderful to have them but not have the associated seizing that comes with the pollen unfortunately some of the reduced to clear lilies were you know not in their best condition but that was okay but I ended up with two really lovely bouquets in the house which was such a treat because I normally only have the one and it's so nice to come down the stairs first thing in the morning and be greeted by a bright floral display so on Saturday night I had to pre-make a lot of the dishes that we're going to be having the next day because I was volunteering in kids church on Sunday so I wasn't going to be available for most of the day so it was important for me to do a lot of meal trip which I did after we had dinner and this dish that I'm actually making has become a new family favorite and it is a squash courgette and corn casserole and it is a fantastic side dish and it's basically some butternut squash with some courgette or I think in America is called zucchini although I still think courgette sounds a lot nicer and sweet corn onion garlic cheddar cheese sour cream mayonnaise eggs and breadcrumbs with some parmesan cheese and it is awesome the way I see it is it's kind of like a the stuffing that you make a Christmas to go with turkey and this one is just a lot better because it's got all of these wonderful seasonal ingredients so I basically start off by sauteing the onions on sort of low heat because I want them to cook slowly and to become quite translucent and then I go ahead and I prepare my butternut squash now normally I prefer to do mise en paté which is whereby I prep all of the things that I'm going to cook and then I'll start cooking but because it was quite late by the time I and because I took time to do the floral arrangements which hadn't been planned because when I went to Aldi it was just to pick up some of these extra ingredients that I needed to complete the menu and so I hadn't planned the time of actually doing the floral arrangement and so because I'm kind of trying to catch up I'm actually making things as I go so that's why I had to chop the onions first and whilst they're sauteing and preparing the other vegetables so with the butternut squash I used the slicer on the grater because I wanted them to be nice thin slices it only occurred to me later that I could have used my machine I do have a I can't remember what it's called but you know those machines that you can just stick things in and then they just were things around for you but anyway I did it this way but you want them to be in thin slices I suppose you could grate them if you wanted to but I feel like you lose the texture at least this way you can still keep the texture and so I'll add them to the onions in order for them to just saute with the onions and then next I'm preparing the courgettes who else loves the bright green color of courgettes I can't wait for our own courgettes to come to come in of course some courgettes segments that are growing and always homegrown courgettes is so incredibly delicious but anyway we'll make do with this one for now so I'm slicing the courgettes into like really like very thin slices and that's mostly because they look so much nicer with the little strips of of green there and once I've chopped all of those I will then also add them to the same pan where I'm frying the onions with the butternut squash and also another point to make is that I've used butter for the sauteing so you can't go too high with the temperature because the butter will burn and scorch and that isn't what we're trying to do here we're just trying to saute them and just get them really nice flavor some and caramelized the onions that is and these ones we're adding them in to sort of sweat them and start the cooking process because I find that if you just chuck them all in together uncooked and then just put them into the oven it doesn't have quite the same flavor it's almost like when you sweat them in the oil that you're using it helps them to absorb more flavor and then I'm prepping the garlic just by finely dicing it and it gives a really lovely flavor to it as well and that will go in and these are all of the things that are going to be the hot ingredients so to speak everything else is just going to be added on and by the way I will put the quantities and the recipe in the description box down below if you wanted to try this out this is a lovely lovely meal and you could have it actually as a lunch as well with a salad on the side but we used it as a side dish that went together with the lamp so I'm then transferring it all into a big bowl and then everything else is going to be added the cheese the sweet corn I would have preferred to use fresh corn but I thought they didn't have any fresh corn in Aldi by the time that I went to buy these in these things I was lucky enough to get the flowers on reduced to clear because they were going to be closed on Easter Sunday so they hadn't restocked any of the shelves so it meant that I think it but I used some tin sweet corn that was in the cupboard and so that's the cheddar cheese added and then I'm going to add some sour cream there and the mayonnaise and the two eggs and the breadcrumbs as well as some Parmesan cheese and then I'll add seasoning to our seasoning to my taste which is normally just like a few just like a pinch or so or salt or a few cracks on the salt grinder and then this is all of this is just going to be put into a nice big tray and then it will go into the oven so it does come together really quickly particularly if you use machines to prepare the vegetables which in hindsight I probably should have done and in future I probably will do this will now go into the oven at a 160 degrees Celsius fan assisted for about 40 minutes or so until it has cooked through the next thing that I'm going to make is a starter of cold cheddar bay biscuits and I got this recipe from a website called the cozy cook so I would link that in the description box down below I had to make a few changes because some of the ingredients I didn't have them and it's an American recipe so one of the first things was that it required some buttermilk and we don't actually get buttermilk sold in shops here in England so I made my own buttermilk by adding lemon to some milk and I just added copious amounts of lemon juice until the milk looked sufficiently thick enough so the best way that I could describe these cheddar bay biscuits is that if you're in England they are very similar in recipe format to dumplings except for you're not going to cook them in a stew you put them in the oven so as you can see there I'm adding the lemon juice to the milk and I have no exact formula for this I just keep on adding the milk until it gets to a point where it looks thicker than normal milk and so to all the dry ingredients I then add the grated cheddar I'm using mild cheddar here but if you wanted something stronger you probably could do these are going to work as odors in a way that's sort of like the entrees and then the buttermilk is added to the melted butter which will make it look quite weird with this little I want to say little texture dots and things which to me they seem to resemble a sweat because if you were making dumplings you would use sweat in the you'd be using sweat to to make the dumplings and then you add that to the dry mixture and critically when you're making this you don't want to over mix the the mixture itself so you need to do it very very gently just until everything is combined but no more beyond that and I'm just going to put these on to a tray and pop them into the oven and I'm sharing this recipe here because the kids really like this as an entree they they love it and so I'll just make it into sort of a biscuity type things and because it's nice and savory and it's got this really lovely umami flavor to it it does sort of sweat the appetite to prepare you for the main course and these ones need a higher temperature so that's why they went in after the casserole or I think there was a little bit of an overlap and then I had to increase the temperature for them and the idea was that for both of these things that I would make them on the Saturday evening and then on the Sunday for the Easter Sunday dinner they would just get warmed up and then be served I also needed to prepare a shoe pastry for the cream puff cake so whilst I was gathering all those ingredients together the oven pinged and it was time to get the cheddar bay biscuits out and they looked so good I couldn't help but have a sneaky taste of them whilst they're still nice and hot fresh out of the oven and I think that they are best served fresh out of the oven but because needs must I had to prepare everything in advance they just had to be warmed up the next day so moving on to the cream puff cake I start off by making the roux by having the milk and the butter in a saucepan over medium heat and I will melt those until the butter has just melted using a whisk to keep things going so that the milk doesn't scotch on the bottom of the pan and then I will add the plain flour and mix it in until it comes to a dough and then I'll just keep on mixing for probably another couple of minutes or so just to cook it and then I'll take it off the heat but it will come together it should come together in the way that you're seeing here shoe pastry is so easy to make and it's a wonderful light base for things like profiteroles or eclairs or this cream puff cake that I'm making and so the idea is that I'm going to make the base for it tonight and then I will do the filling tomorrow so I'll now use my mixer to add the eggs in there and so we get the mixer going and I'll add the eggs one at a time and it looks very nice and creamy and that's the butter that you get and I'm just going to pop that into the rectangular tray that's been lined with some baking parchment paper so that it will make it easy for me to lift it out when the time comes and I will just spread it on there and that will go into the oven at 200 degrees because it does need the high heat in order to create the puffiness to go out and it will be in there for about 15 to 20 minutes and then what I'll do is I'll just turn off the oven and I'll leave it in there to cool down for about 10 15 minutes in the oven with the heat and then it will come out and I'll leave it out on the table and because I was cooking in such a rush I wasn't doing my usual thing of the process by which I normally cook is I put things away as I go along but because it was at night and I had a pretty full-on day the next day I was trying to get the food out and then the idea was that I would then clean afterwards so this is now me resetting the kitchen and it is a must to reset the kitchen it's one of the things that I learned from Fly Lady and I know I bring up Fly Lady a lot but that's because that system really really improved my homekeeping and housekeeping skills and it brought everything under control and one of the things that I learned from Fly Lady is that you always reset the kitchen never wake up to a dirty kitchen that is a recipe for a terrible day for me so I always make sure that I do that so even though it was quite late and I was quite tired and I was feeling that I ought to go to bed I I I got on with it and some help came in the form of my daughter offering to be of assistance and she helped with it and it you know it went well but I do find it very satisfying resetting the kitchen so that it's ready for the next sort of baking or cooking adventures Sunday wonderful I've woken up a little bit earlier because here in England our clocks were jumping forward by one hour from 1 a.m. to 2 a.m. so technically speaking I'm one hour sleep deprived but I had to get up early because I wanted to get some of the food done and some of the things that can be prepped as early as possible done because I'm volunteering at the Easter service today so I won't be here for the first half of the day so it's very important for me to get these things that I couldn't expect the kids to do so I'm just gonna make the filling for the cream puff cake that I started on yesterday and that's going to be the dessert and it will have time to set for a few hours so yeah so exciting I ended up going to bed quite late at about 11 but at least I managed to reset the kitchen so that when I came down in the morning it wouldn't be completely messy I don't like starting the day with a messy kitchen so yeah I'm just gonna make that very quickly and then I will get on to other stuff I'm going to be using mostly cream cheese with some double cream going to be using lemon with some vanilla flavouring as well as some icing sugar I start off by squeezing the juice of a lemon just on the squeezer I could use the lemon juice but I sometimes just prefer using fresh lemons and so I've got the cream cheese in there and I'll add the lemon to the cream cheese and that will give it like a bit of a tartness to it and I'm also adding some vanilla this is an optional it's not necessary and the icing sugar and then in another bowl I have the double cream which I'm going to whip so the idea is basically you mix the cream cheese with the lemon and the icing sugar you whip the double cream and then you fold the whipped double cream into the cream cheese very gently and then that will make the filling so I use the electric whisk to beat the icing sugar which was quite lumpy and I really should have used a sieve on it but hindsight is always 20-20 and so once the double cream has been whipped I will then add it very gently and fold it in to the cream cheese because I don't want to knock out those air bubbles that I've worked so hard to incorporate and to give it more texture and more fluff so this comes together so very very quickly and it's basically like I would say it's more like a very lightweight cream cheese filling like if you ever made those no bake cream cheesecakes this probably tastes like that and so that's going to go on to the choux pastry base that I made yesterday and then I'll add a caramel topping on it my son made some caramel that will go over it so obviously this is now a day old so it's sort of sunken in a little bit but it's still quite delicious so I'm just spreading all of that luscious cheesecake-y filling goodness over the top and just to point out that you can make this less thick just by controlling the amount of whipping that you do with your double cream so I I like it to to be so that when you cut into it the filling maintains its shape so I whip the cream until stiff peaks form but if you wanted it to be less stiff you just less of that but it's a really good one because it's quite versatile and you can also use it with a biscuit base instead of a choux base but it tasted really good everybody everybody loved this this was a really popular one and it's a great one for Easter and for spring because it is nice and light it will need to go into the fridge to set it needs a minimum of about three to four hours thank you so much for coming along with us on our Easter weekend vlog I hope that you also had a joyful and blessed Easter and until I see you next time I wish you blue skies health and happiness