9th May

The highlight of today was that we were having a family video Bake-Off challenge involving me - making banana muffins, my sister Kaye making chocolate chip cookies and my niece Elena and great nephew Jack making ginger biscuits with Mum looking on as judge - a sort of Sandi Tosvig/ Noel Fielding all-in-one!!!  I decided to get all the ingredients measured out and ready so that when the time came I would be ready to go.

We didn't have much we could get on with today so we decided to chill out on the day bed for a while - I am not entirely sure who is the most comfortable John or Mr Boo - he just loves to snuggle up and although we are a bit concerned because he isn't eating very much you cannot say he looks unwell from that picture.

We had our family video call - it is a bit difficult to try and interact all four of us without talking all over one another and I know mum finds it difficult to hear us but it is a great way of trying to stay connected - so much so that John is hoping to do the same with his family tomorrow - not bake obviously but to chat.

I used a recipe for banana muffins I haven't done before and had a bit of a nightmare because I had used one recipe to gather the ingredients together and then was trying to follow a completely different one for the instructions - it kept referring to ingredients I didn't have to hand so eventually I worked out what was happening.

The mix for these was very stiff to say the least and John had added a bit of brown sugar (because he knows best now that he has got to grips with cooking) so they didn't quite come out as I had expected.  Still we made about sixteen and this is the first batch coming out of the oven.

The idea was that we would all post our completed batches as each recipe required a different cooking time and Mum would have to judge on appearance alone.

Based on appearance Mum decided that Jack and I deserved joint first but I do feel that there was some favouritism going on there and I am not sure that Mum would ever chose chocolate chip cookies anyway so poor Kaye was on to a loser there in the first place.

Anyway I decided that fairest thing would be for John to do a taste test and report back to Mum so that she could make an informed decision about which was the best effort and then I would be able to issue the certificates accordingly.

Here is my chief taster and his official verdict was that they were too sweet and I blame the addition of the brown sugar!!  So armed with this information Mum decided that Jack was, once again, the winner in the bakery challenge.

At the end of the day it was just for fun and it is a great way of getting our family together.  We now have less than two weeks to deal with the restrictions - maybe that isn't a bad thing as we are definitely getting a bit stir crazy - or maybe just crazy!!!

My extract from The Ration Book...

After the Japanese overran the British colony of Singapore in 1942 they swiftly ransacked private and public buildings for as much scrap metal as they could find. In most cases they took the obvious things, including the railings around churches and (worryingly) the security bars protecting house windows.  More surprisingly was their removal of the iron posts which carried the power supply for the local trams - which of course then stopped running!!