Le Bébé de Chocolat et Bonne Fête à Rayures!

Today I was really poorly. We've all been suffering with a nasty cold since last Thursday, but it's really caught up with me today. Not fun.

Fran went out to teach one of her lessons this afternoon and left me with the children. Marc is also feeling poorly and was apparently up at 6am, so he was playing up. As a bit of a bribe/calming him down after school thing, Fran let him have one of his chocolate eggs (he still has some little ones left over from Easter!) and rather than having just one, he brought his whole chocolate stash bowl into the living room.

He then had one of his eggs (after opening one other and deciding that he didn't want that one anymore - probably because it was broken but he just had a tantrum about it) and I stuck him in front of Sesame Street (I have about 75 podcast episodes of this on my laptop and he loves it!) while I went to make dinner in the next room.

Aurianne has finally learnt to crawl and is now getting into everything so I came back in every few minutes to check she hadn't found wires/got stuck under a chair. I then went out to serve up their dinner and was definitely not out of the room for more than 3-5 minutes. I walked back in to tell Marc that it was time to come and sit up to the table, and heard Aurianne scrunching some plastic. She had her back to me, but when she turned round I realised what she'd got; a plastic bag that (had) contained Marc's star chocolates and foam fish sweets. I then noticed there was no chocolate in this bag, and that, instead, it was all over her face, hands and clothes. She was really pleased with herself!

I took the remainder of the sweets away (just some of the foam fish sweets, one of which she'd clearly chewed on and decided she didn't like...) and tried to clean up the sticky baby! She'd managed to get it everywhere, including on the glass table and the carpet! I wish I'd taken a picture because it was hilarious, but I was too busy trying to sort her out.

I was mid-stripping her clothes off while trying to keep Marc, who was attempting to punch/hit his thieving little sister, at a distance, when Fran came back. Not quite the 'calm and well-organised scene with children happily eating dinner up to the table' look I was aiming for! So embarrassing!

Chocolate cake and
Chocolate/Raspberry Sauce

I decided that I would make a chocolate cake this afternoon (cravings), but didn't get a chance to thanks to the chocolate baby, but did once the children were asleep. I had planned to use the Kenwood but it seemed like more effort in the end...

I used the BBC All in One Chocolate Cake recipe to make it. When they say "the cake mixture will be very liquid" they aren't kidding! It also says 'Preparation time less than 30 mins' but I'm pretty sure it took me well over an hour - partly because I'm not feeling very well so everything is a bit all over the place, but also because I don't know where Fran keeps all her baking stuff yet. I also managed to pour boiling water, straight from the kettle, all over my finger, which obviously slowed me down even more.

Chestnut Creme
(It doesn't taste like Christmas)

"Mmmm, so moist!"

We also made a chocolate sauce which we'd intended to make into a ganache, but instead we made it with creme fraiche, dark chocolate, frozen raspberries and chestnut cream or 'Creme de Marrons de l'Ardeche' which Fran & Charly insisted I tried, telling me 'it tastes like Christmas!' (for the record, it doesn't taste like Christmas, it tastes like fig rolls).

The cake ended up being very well-timed though as it turned out that Charly actually got a promotion today! Being in the Navy, this means another stripe on the uniform (hence the 'Happy Stripe Day' blog title) so a cake was very befitting.

Fran got out candles, and then Fran and I sang 'Happy Stripe Day to youuu' to Charly and then we ate cake.

Just one last thing to add, Charly had to help a barge that had fallen over in the harbour today. Apparently, 'just like in one of Marc's Thomas the Tank engine books'. I wish I had a picture to post, ideally with the caption 'go home barge, you're drunk', but I don't. A shame really as the pictures Charly was showing me were hilarious.