Jubilations

This weekend we were in Preston to celebrate the Queen’s Diamond Jubilee with a good old British tea party in the rain! After the beautiful weather last week, we were all looking forward to gathering in the garden for a sunny party but it wasn’t to be! Luckily the party was on Saturday when there were just a few showers, not Sunday when the heavens really opened on all the street parties and River Pageant!

Our first job to prepare for the party was to make Annabelle a crown fit for a Queen! This is about as close to an ‘invitation to play’ as I have got yet, but I am working on making some more (to be explained another time!) I cut out the crown shape on some black card as I thought black would show off the glitter well, and provided Annabelle with a selection of materials including PVA glue and spreader, glitter glue, pom poms, foam shapes, glitter, stick-on jewels, and sequins. I didn’t buy any of this especially, it was all in our craft cupboard already – although maybe that says more about my addiction to craft goodies than my thriftiness!

Next on the agenda was biscuits. I was very excited to crack open all my birthday cookie cutters so we made 2 batches of cookies with different recipes. We made crown jewel/diamond biscuits with this recipe from BBC food, although I adapted it slightly with less ginger and some added cinnamon because I love the stuff! I used a square cookie cutter to make the big biscuits, and cut out the middles with a diamond shape. I then used the diamonds to make smaller biscuits and cut the middles out with an apple corer. We filled the holes with crushed boiled sweets (we had lots of fun smashing the sweets with a rolling pin!) and then baked. I had made similar biscuits at Christmas time with my class at school so I knew they would look effective.

I also used Nigella Lawson’s rainy day biscuit recipe from Nigella Bites to make my Alphabet biscuits. These were meant to be a bit of an anagram game for the party but someone (ahem, Grandma!) ate some before they got laid out properly for everyone to see!

At the party we had a lovely time seeing family and eating lots of yummy party food. Grandma and Grandad did a great job of decorating their garden and Annabelle loved sitting on the swing waving her flag with the balloons wafting around in the wind!

Happy Jubilee everybody! More flag waving fun to come when the Olympic Torch Relay heads to town!

 

  1. Love the crown and Queen Annabelle.

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