My favourite chocolate cupcakes

I've had a love of baking ever since I was a child but I guess back then I never did much more than just licking the bowl... I  still have a little recipe book called: "My First Recipes: Sweet Things" that I got when I was about 9 and I used to love going through it and planning recipes. Sadly, they never turned out quite right... I'll never forget some iced butter biscuits I made once that tasted (and felt) like they were made out of cement!
A few years later, at Uni, I bought my first electric mixer (that I still use!) and slowly but steadily I've been learning to bake a few things here and there. It's all helped by shows like the "Great British Bake Off" (big fan!) and the fact that my husband will eat pretty much anything I bake and has quite a sweet tooth.

N is always quite keen to "help" in the kitchen and so we bake together sometimes. We were very fortunate to have some switch equipment donated to her by the 'Handicapped Childrens Action Group' charity which has helped to get her even more involved. N uses switches to play computer games, operate electronic toys or even turn the electric mixer on and off. They're basically big push buttons that she can press more easily than the buttons on certain toys, computer mouse or even the electric mixer. We have a special mains controller to which the mixer and the switches are plugged and so she uses the yellow switch to turn the mixer on and the red for off. We first used it for her to turn a light on/off, then the Christmas lights, hairdryer, fan... Endless fun when you're a child!

So I wanted to share with you my favourite chocolate cupcake recipe with the help of my lovely baking assistant Miss N. These cupcakes are very soft and fluffy and the contrast of the sweet cake with the slight bitterness of the dark chocolate in the icing is just irresistible!

Look at me being all messy and not getting into trouble for it!

Ingredients:

- 25g of Options Belgian Hot Chocolate powder (I didn't have cocoa the first time I made these and so used my instant hot chocolate powder instead. I loved it so much that I never changed back to cocoa)

- 50 g diced unsalted butter

- 100g caster sugar

- 1 medium egg

- 85g plain flour

- 1/2 tsp bicarbonate of soda

- 1/4 tsp baking powder

And for the icing:

- 50ml double cream

- 50g dark chocolate (60%)

1. Line cupcake tins with paper cupcake cases.

2. Pour 100ml of boiling water over the cocoa in a small bowl and whisk until smooth then leave to cool at room temperature.

3. Cream the butter and the sugar until pale (turn the oven to 180°C)

4. Incorporate the egg, then the dry ingredients and finally the liquid cocoa.

5. Bake the cupcakes for about 15 min and then leave to cool on a cake rack.

6. For the icing, bring the cream to the boil, remove from the hob and add the chocolate so that it will melt into a glossy cream. Drop about a teaspoon of icing on top of each cupcake and enjoy!!

And now, just to recap:

First we add the butter

Then we add the sugar

I'm the switch master!!

But I like to hold the mixer too!

Then comes the flour

Do I have something on my face?

Quick mix of the cocoa

And a sneaky taste, just to make sure

One final mix and the batter is ready

Into the cupcake cases

How did it get on my nose?

Ready to eat!

Yummy!

Finally, the joy of breastfeeding

Being able to breastfeed my babies was always something close to my heart, something I always wished I would be able to do when I had my children. Unfortunately, things didn't go according to plan after my first pregnancy. My identical twin girls were born at 23 weeks and 2 days and life was pretty much a continuous nightmare for the first five months. My youngest twin, Isabella, lived only for two days and N went through five tough months during which she had to continuously fight to survive. Towards the end of her hospital stay I started trying to breastfeed her but it really wasn't easy. Poor thing, she was eager, but she was so very small!! To make matters worse she has a facial palsy (paralysis) on the left side of her face so it was extremely difficult for her to latch on...

In the end I decided to express my milk and give it to her in a bottle because at least that way we could put our fingers on the corners of her mouth to help her create some suction. By that point I had become an expert in the 'art of expressing milk'. It started the day she was born, just a few mls of hand expressed milk but by the second day, with the help of my trusted pump, I was starting to produce some good quantities. I was terrified of not having enough milk for my girls. I had read in the "Baby Whisperer" book that if you only express milk without breastfeeding the baby, you lose your milk supply after a few weeks. How was I going to do it?? Not to mention how important it seemed to be to have skin to skin contact. This was simply not an option at this point and I was only able to hold N when she was 11 days old.

Holding N for the first time

As it turns out, these things might be helpful but they weren't essential and I managed to feed N with my expressed milk until she was nearly one year old. For me the important thing was to be consistent and I religiously expressed milk from both sides every four hours, 20 minutes each, even if there wasn't much coming out towards the end, at least there was bit of stimulation. And things worked so well that at one point I was expressing about 2 litres of milk a day! Unfortunately N had lots of issues with her gut and didn't really feed orally properly until she was 3 and half months old. Up until that point it was always building up from 0.5ml/1ml every hour for a few days until the next infection when we would hear the dreadful words: "She's nil by mouth" which meant none of mummy's milk for my little girl. It was horrible. I was working so hard to make this milk for her (there was not much else I could do for her) and she couldn't have it... 

My freezer at home was completely full of frozen breastmilk and I ended up donating milk to St. Thomas hospital (until they told me they couldn't process any more of my milk) and Queen Charlotte's & Chelsea hospital milk banks. At least someone could have that milk. I also knew from the mothers around me in the neonatal unit that many struggled to have enough milk for their babies; it's not easy when you're living under such stress and these premature babies really benefit from having breastmilk.

Fortunately, A's birth was as good as anyone could hope and even though she didn't drink much milk in the first couple of days (neither of us had a clue about what to do...) she caught on pretty quickly and started gaining weight. My problem in the early weeks was thinking that she needed to eat for 20 minutes or else she wasn't having enough. To this day she's usually done in about 10-15 minutes and I guess it was important to learn that you need to get to know your baby. 

I'm loving being able to breastfeed her. She's 3 months old and she is always very cute with her smiles and her little chubby hands holding on to my breast. Things are so much easier this time around! Apart from having mastitis when she was one week old (scary and very, very painful...) being able to just go out and know that I can feed her anywhere has been great. With N the routine was more like feeding for an hour, expressing for 40 minutes, washing and sterilising pump and bottles and then... oh wait, it's time for the next feed...

Knowing what I know now I would never choose to express milk and feed from a bottle as a routine although I might do it eventually so that I can a have a break from the constant feeding. For the moment though, it's still really nice... just not at 2am, or 4am... 

Happy Mother's day!! (in Portugal, anyway...)

Being a mother has become a defining characteristic of who I am. In fact, as many women surely experience, once you have a baby and especially if you become a full-time mum, you quickly go from being a person with your own name to being "someone's" mum. I love being a mother, don't get me wrong, but I've found that it's only too easy to completely obliterate yourself from your own life because this other little person consumes your every thought. Three years on I've gotten better at this but I still leave the house sometimes without so much as a glimpse in the mirror, wearing whatever.

I couldn't write about motherhood without mentioning my own mother. She's the most important woman in my life, definitely the most influential, for everything she is, everything she's been through. She's a real warrior, loving and kind, and very tolerant and forgiving. We are very close and I think our relationship played a big part in the fact that I've always felt I would like to be a mother some day. And I always thought that if I could be half the mother she is, and my kids loved me half as much as I love her then it would be just great.

Unfortunately, I haven't quite managed to shake off the self-doubt that came into my life as I became a mum. "Am I doing enough?" is not so much of a constant, nagging question in my mind anymore, but it creeps up now and then and self-doubt is a powerful thing when it comes to making you feel down. I wonder if this feeling is more intense because of N's cerebral palsy? How can you be less than an extraordinary mum when you've got such an extraordinary daughter? Maybe it's because in a way I refuse to accept that her condition can't improve, that she can't acquire new skills and I feel that it's my job (literally) to help her get there. I don't want to fall into the trap of living my life (and forcing her to live hers) with the sole purpose of being "cured", but it's important to try and keep moving forward. I think these feelings are common to every mum, but with a disabled child that needs so much help to learn new things the stakes are really set at another level.

But I guess the defining thing about motherhood for me is the joy that it brings. I could be having a pretty rough day but my heart swells up with happiness when my little girls smile at me. When I go pick up N at nursery I'll have A all snugged up in her sling in the most perfect hug, and then N comes out from class and she's got the biggest smile when she sees me, giggling with excitement (it still pales in comparison to her reaction to daddy coming to pick her up, but that's a different story and I'll take what I can get). And then I walk home, 'me and my girls' and I'm happy, all my problems shoved at the back of my mind somewhere, knowing that I mean the world to them, just as much as they mean the world to me.

Growing sunflowers from seeds

N goes to nursery in a really great special school in East London and last term they were learning about how things grow so I thought it would be a good idea for her to grow something at home. It's something I'd been wanting to do since last year but then we moved at the beginning of Summer and life got in the way of that. I was thinking it would be fun to grow some green beans because that takes me back to memories of school, wrapping a bean in cotton wool with some water and watching the new plant emerge... In the end we actually planted some sunflower seeds which should hopefully grow into a beautiful yellow flower. N uses sign language (Signalong) and yellow flower is something she can sign and understand the meaning of. The beans will have to wait, for now.

We had the seeds growing for a few days in a tiny pot 

Here's N's showing off the nice long roots

The plan was to use the little spade to fill the pot

But I should have known that there's nothing better than your own hands

Into the pot it goes (picture perfect, even if only for a split second- good job daddy!)

And job done, with just a little bit of help, and only a minor injury to the seedling, which lost a leaf...

Brand new: About me

I wanted to write a blog about my life as mother of two little girls, one of which was born at only 23 weeks and has quadriplegic cerebral palsy. N is my oldest daughter and is 3 and half. She's an extraordinary girl that has challenged medical expectations from day one and whose early birth not only turned my life completely upside down but also changed its course forever. My other baby, A, is only 2 and half months old and had (thankfully!) a much more ordinary start in life. Then there's T, my wonderful husband who inspires the most loving feelings and drives me crazy in equal measure.

I don't want the focus of the blog to be on the fact that I have a daughter with cerebral palsy. That is an unquestionable big part of our lives but it's not the main focus, and so it shouldn't be, as far as I'm concerned.  I guess I try, as much as possible, to live as if N's condition didn't exist, at least in the sense that I don't want to stop trying to do things just because it's more of a hassle. So this blog is about me, my family and how I'm trying to find ways to always be happy no matter what life throws at me.