Irchester Country Park Summer Fun Day

Northamptonshire Childminding Association organise several summer fun days each year.  This year they've been at East Carlton Park and today, at Irchester Country Park.  The next event will be NCA's 20th Birthday party at Abington Park, Northampton.  The activities are open to everyone, not just childminders.

Here are some pictures of our day at Irchester.  We were lucky with the weather and avoided getting too wet.

Simple Jam Biscuits

The children love to bake, here is a simple recipe for jam biscuits. It can easily be adapted to be dairy and egg free.


200g self raising flour
100g caster sugar
100g of butter
1 egg, beaten or a flax egg (1tbsp flax seeds mixed with 3tbsp warm water)
4tbsp of jam or lemon curd

Preheat your oven to 190C or gas mark 5.

Rub the flour, sugar and butter together with your hands until the mixture resembles breadcumbs. It is very quick to do by hand but you could use a food processor if you prefer. Add enough egg to bring to bring the mixture to a stiff dough. You only need about half an egg. I think next time I will make a double quantity to make use of the whole egg. I can always add a little milk if it isn't wet enough.

Shape the dough into a sausage shape, it needs to be about 5cm thick. Now cut this into 12 rounds and lay them down on a baking tray (they do spread). The tray doesn't need to be greased.

Make a small indentation in the middle of each biscuit either with the end of a wooden spoon or your finger. Add a drop of jam or lemon curd in the centre. Bake for roughly 12 minutes, they should be risen and golden in colour. Pop them onto a rack to cool.

The original recipe from BBC Good Food used jam as the filling. As you can see from the photograph, we tried chocolate spread. It was the Nutella brand, it didn't melt/spread across the biscuit, not very nice in my opinion. I have just made another batch for our picnic tomorrow and added lemon curd. Don't tell the children but I stole one, big thumbs up for the lemon curd, they are delicious.