It seemed like a good idea at the time....

I read on someone's blog (sorry, I don't remember where) about a student who had used the knobless cylinders in the knobbled cylinder blocks so I thought that would be a new twist on the activity for Ebi-kun to try. BUT I didn't check beforehand that the pieces fit and well, they don't, some go in  fine and others get stuck, here is Ebi-kun trying to get the stuck bits out....

We decided that it was a bad idea so I suggested he get the cylinder patterns out instead so he decided to use both pieces of equipment and came up with this....
All was going well and I left the room for a short time and came back to this.... (Ebi-kun was sat on the sofa 'taking a rest')
All the cylinders were out either lined up or on the patterns, I think next time I will challenge him to do the patterns with the knobbled cylinders so that he doesn't have the colour to help him.

On a completely different note, we got a load of kaki the other day, the trees round here are dripping with them at the moment, I quite like eating them as they are but we had too many so I decided to make jam. It was easy and the jam is delicious, thick and sticky, sooooo good on hot toast!

I completely made the recipe up and I think you could get away with less sugar, it is quite sweet.

Peel and chop the kaki then weigh the fruit, I had 500g

Put into a saucepan.

Add sugar, half the amount of the fruit, in my case 250g 

Add a bit of water, I put in about 200ml.

Pop on the stove and bring to the boil, once it is boiling reduce the heat to a simmer and add a few shakes of ground ginger. Keep on a simmer until the water is reduced and the jam is thick and sticky, it took me about 30 minutes.

Jar as usual. This made one big pot for us, I am sure I will be making more since Ebi-kun has munched his way through half of it already - OK, he did have some help from me :o)