Art and Cooking - Vanilla, Pear and Ricotta Cake

Very exciting thing happened this morning.  It was great to cook with my little chefs and then to have them pull out some art equipment themselves to paint and draw while the cake was baking was fantastic.  I think this cake worked out a little too gelatinous, somewhere between a sponge and a cheese cake, but my children love it.

Vanilla, Pear and Ricotta Cake

Ingredients
150g ricotta
2 pears
1/2 cup caster sugar
4 seperated eggs
1/2 cup plain flour
3/4 tspn baking powder

Syrup
1 cup of castor sugar
1 cup of water
1/4 tsp vanilla essence

Preparation
1. Preheat oven to 180C. Line the base and sides of a 20 centimetre solid based cake tin, with greaseproof paper. Ensure the collar of the grease proof paper is 3-4 centimetres higher than sides of the tin.

2.  remove woody stem, stem fibres and seeds from pear and slice into thick segments.

3. For syrup, place water and castor sugar into a saucepan. Bring to a rapid boil over a high heat. Boil for 6–8 minutes or until it begins to form brown caramel colour. Continue cooking for 2–3 minutes over a high heat until deep golden brown but not burnt.

3. Immediately pour into the cake pan to prevent further cooking. Arrange pear on top of syrup.  I had the syrup simmering while we were making the batter so it was ready only shortly before arranging the pear, rather than sharing the opportunity for a melted sugar burn, I had a production line of assistants passing me pear to arrange in a flower on the syrup.

4. Separate the eggs.  It helped to do this with my eager, on looking little chefs by saying we were going to try and capture the egg yolks.  There are simple things like separating the eggs and folding meringue into a batter that seems really interesting to little chefs.

Method

1. For cake batter, in a mixing bowl beat half the sugar with egg yolks until thick and pale. Add a small lid/cap (about 1/2 tsp) full of vanilla essence and mix through.   Add the ricotta into the egg yolk mixture, whisk for 30 seconds to combine.

2. Sift in the flour and baking powder and beat for 1 minute or until batter is smooth. Pour into a large mixing bowl and set aside.

3. Place egg whites into a clean mixing bowl and whisk until soft peaks form. Continue to whisk, gradually adding remaining sugar. Continue to whisk until sugar has dissolved.  For the first time today my eldest little chef was able to do this unassisted.  My youngest needed me to be there poised and on the ready to realign and make sure nothing dangerous happened, one finger on the switch and holding the beater in place, eyes on little hands.

4. Gently fold in the meringue 1/3 at a time into the batter mixture using a metal spoon.  This is not a job for little hands unless you know they are familiar with it.  We have never approached folding meringue in together so they were just happy to watch and learn a new cooking skill.

5. Pour mixture into a prepared tin and bake for 40-45 minutes, or until cooked all the way through. Remove from oven and allow to cool in the tin for 45 minutes to an hour. Before turning out pull out or cut off baking paper collar so it is level with the cake.

6. Turn out on plate and remove baking paper base.

 

Sight Words with Rod Clement

Sight words are those most common and frequent words used in our everyday reading and writing. Words that may not be easily sounded out and are best learnt to be recognised on sight. These are words that might hold an idea rather than be associated with an image.

My first born is only now coming to a stage where he is starting to ask about words as we read together and learning early literacy with letter tracing at school. He tends to get a bit frustrated with letter tracing though. I have put together my own sight words bingo from Playful Learning.

Making this game was my introduction to site words as a literacy aid.  I love this idea and I loved this introduction and have had it in the back of my mind as we do other activities.  Recently my son has been getting more letter and number exposure with more "practical" tasks like playing Battleships.  This is two-fold learning through play for him and my two year old as they get to exercise their fine motor skills by packing up all the little white and red pegs and they both get to help be part of the letter and number identification on the coordinate grid.

Whilst reading 'Feathers for Phoebe' we have begun, inadvertently, on our sight words journey.  I can't wait to find more of these kinds of books to continue building on these sight words adventures.  Phoebe goes through and chooses from a selection of items until she has completed her transformation to be a spectacularly coloured and feathered bird on her quest to be noticed.  He now identifies easily and calls out 'yes', 'no' and 'maybe' as with each element of her new look Phoebe chooses the wings, crest, tail and chest.

Maths and Art - Symmetry and Tesselations

Tesselation is the repetition of a geometric shape that fits together like a puzzle, without any gaps or overlaps.  This is a fantastic project that explores symmetry and shape repetition, plus you get to introduce your little person the Escher.

Tesselation Project for Kids from Leap Frog also included a great tesselation template, added below.  

Exploring maths in art must include M.C. Escher.  Young children love puzzles and the idea of helping them create their own tesselation 

Squares

Finally finished.  Squares exhibition will be running from Friday 21st September – Sunday 14th October, 2012.

90 Stockdill Drive, Holt ACT 2615
PO Box 4746, Higgins ACT 2615
F (02) 6254 6924
E info@strathnairn.com.au

Squares

One down, two to go.  A little deviation from my original concept, you need to work with what you've got and at the moment it's very little sleep and a day filled with children and childish play.

Squares

The squares exhibition held at the Strathnairn Arts Association Gallery in Holt, Canberra, is on soon.  I started working on these when I first found out about the exhibition and bought my entry packs.  The essence of the exhibition is that you buy the canvases as part of the squares entry pack and produce works to go into the exhibition on these 30x30cm squares.  Initially all my ideas where about little boxes and geeks but my real inspiration and creativity started working when I thought about statements I felt compelled to make.  So I have one motivated by refugees, one by surveillance and another by domestic abuse.

Initial sketches above: the far right was based on a Confucius quote "He who rides a tiger is afraid to dismount".  Middle was a preliminary sketch for the 'Stats' painting.  Right was a geek inspired idea with a male and female square thumb wrestling which I was going to call "Boys wee standing up, girls wee sitting down".  My son came home from school and suddenly started making all these assertions about things that my daughter couldn't do because she was a girl.  We overcame this for now by saying the only difference between boys and girls is girls wee sitting down and boys wee standing up.    

 

Stats.  There will be things in each house for statistical representation of domestic violence, child abuse, neglect and alcoholism.  While researching for this work I discovered the following which I will be representing symbolically in the painting.  15% of households are filled with domestic violence, of this 4% is committed against men, 14% of children are sexually abused, of this percentage over 70% is perpetrated by a parent, 27% of Australian children are subjected to physical, emotional abuse or neglect.

 'The waves are made of hands' is symbolic of the loss of lives escaping persecution, civil war or famine on a perilous journey to Australia.  Ever since the Vietnam war Australia has seen refugees making a dangerous and often disastrous trip by boat to seek refuge.  The Howard government turned these asylum seekers into 'boat people' and fueled hatred, fear and racisism for these "illegal immigrants" who were flooding in via unprotected boarders.  This worked nicely to get people believing the only way to stop this unabating tide was to re-elect him.

This is more inspired by the idea of painting squares or geeks for the Squares exhibition, I was going to have them holding cables, folders and xbox controllers but I think this is working out.  The problem now is I've lost my creative motivation and need to get it back before the 12th of September.

Intestinal Microbacteria and Behaviour

The Autism Enigma aired on ABC last night and is a must watch for health care providers and parents.  It raises the possibility of the relationship between intestinal flora and behaviour, specifically focused on autism.  As the mother of a child who's behaviour is dramatically affected by his diet this episode had strong resonance.  The link was made between extended anti biotic dosage in very young children and the development of a healthy intestinal flora before the age of three.  They followed three cases of children who had developed regressive autism after being prescribed antibiotics for longer than ten days.  They showed tests which simulated the arched back and anti-social behaviour seen in regressive autism by injecting proprionic acid.  It also showed that this behaviour wore off after about thirty minutes.

"..a certain sub-population of bacteria in the gut, including the ones that have been found in patients with regressive autism, produces a fermentation or waste product, a seemingly simple series of molecules called short chain fatty acids.  This is akin to when you put sugar on yeast you get alcohol.  When you put carbs or sugars on these particular bacteria they produce a compound that, in some ways is like alcohol, because it’s a small molecule, it can easily go through the blood stream and get to the brain.  But it’s also slightly different.  And this compound called proprionic acid, for such a simple molecule, when we looked more and more into the literature, we were amazed at the kind of things that it did in terms of cell development and metabolism, cell-cell interaction, brain development, and to brain fat metabolism. PPA is one of a panel of short chain fatty acids that are produced by gut bacteria when they ferment carbohydrates from our diet.  They make proprionic acid, PPA, they also make butyric acid and they also make acetic acid.  But we’re interested in PPA because it seemed to have most of the effects that seem to relate to autism." Dr Derrick McFabe

I wonder how much this microbacteria and the effect on the brain plays a role in my own child's life with his salicylate intolerance.  My son has always had problems with his intestines since being checked into the NICU and given a ridiculously high dose of formula, despite my specifying he was a breast fed baby and to call me up any time from that point I was by his side every moment to the detriment of sleep and my bladder, and antibiotics given at this point he has done fewer solid poos than I have fingers to count them on, he is four.  I feel lucky that all the times I have been given antibiotics scripts to fill and left them in favour of allowing his own immune system to have a go.  If there is the chance of a link and this evidence is compelling, then doctors need to stop routinely prescribing antibiotics to very young children and use them as a last resort.

"The Autism Enigma" follows the work of an international group of scientists researching the human intestine and the clues their work might hold for treating and perhaps preventing this baffling disorder.  - Four Corners

The program can also be seen on ABC News 24 on Saturday at 8.00pm, on ABC iview and at abc.net.au/4corners.