My mother happened to have some ready-made gingerbread dough in the freezer and we made Christmas cookies on Friday. The kids loved making them - it's like play dough but just better because you get to eat the end result!
As the oven was already heated I also baked a pie. I used ready-made dough for the crust and filled it with pears and lemon quark. Once it was baked I sprinkled it with crushed almonds and chocolate (Wiener nougat crush for those of you in Finland).
This was our desert yesterday. I had baked a kulitsa and made a pasha according to the Russian orthodox tradition. Kulitsa is a sweet bread similar to panettoni eaten in some countries during Christmas time. Pasha is a sweet desert made with quark, whipped cream, dried fruits, raisins, ground almond, sugar, eggs and butter. Basically the ingredients are mixed and the mixture is left in a wooden container in the fridge over night. The cyrillic letters XB appear on both kulitsa and pasha (you can't really see them in the picture) and they mean "Christ is risen".
First I explained how the seeds fall on the ground and start growing. I asked her what the plants need in order to grow and after some discussion she drew a sun and some rain clouds.
And then after some time a tree grows! This is the same paper. In the first picture the tree is folded and the seeds and the small plant are drawn on the back of the folded tree. This was done quite quickly which was good since she doesn't really seem to have a lot of concentration today :) We'll work on the river theme later on.
We'll make some muffins a bit later on and I let Luana start her own kitchen notebook. She's very keen to help out in the kitchen and they've started to learn the numbers at school. So I thought we could put together her own recipes. She can draw and practice the numbers and I write the actual recipes as we make them together.
The weekend went really quickly. Saturday was spent at home doing nothing particular. It poured down in the afternoon and the kids took a shower outside. They loved it! It was especially fun as their daddy decided to join in and ran around the front yard in his undies (no picture of that displayed here though...). I baked a Zucchini bread with a recipe from here and it was yummy. I'd call it a cake though instead of bread :)
I got these pretty flowers from one of the girls on Sunday morning. I didn't even know that a flower like this exist. Then again, we live in the Amazon basin, I guess there are many more flowers I didn't even dream existed...
