Birthday Tea

Today is Ferretfingers's birthday and we had our traditional birthday tea of pizzas, sandwiches, crisps, chocolate birthday cake, at least three different varieties of small cakes and, for the first time, a kit-form trifle.

Ferretfingers will not eat trifle.

But if I serve the jelly, blancmange and cake in separate dishes he will quite happily put them all together in his pudding bowl.

I have almost mastered making chocolate blancmange from scratch, rather than out of a packet, using sugar, cornflour, drinking chocolate and milk. My first effort was a bit heavy on the powders and you could have bounced pennies off it. Today's moved a little better.

The other day, as we had some milk going off, I experimented using a jar of unset blackberry jam for flavouring . I don't think I used enough cornflour and/or didn't boil it long enough (too small a pan to risk it) so it remains the consistency of ketchup. Fester is using it as a pouring sauce on bananas and, today, the aforementioned kit form trifle.

Thunderthighs looked at it in disgust and asked "What's that?"

Before I could speak Fester, licking a dribble off the spout of the serving vessel, replied "Rat's poo."

Thunderthighs "Thanks Compo."

Runs in the family like a wooden leg, as Mum used to say.