Redwall Day – 20 February 2007

With everything happening around here, I haven’t written up about Redwall Day. The Luptons have started a Redwall Readers Club. Thankfully, when they first flagged it last year, they ran out of time to do it! It gave my older two 7 months to read the books and get "hooked" on the series.

This is a cardboard model of Redwall Abbey. It looks very medieval and some aspects of the books seem to be set in this time. However, the books have mice, hares, badgers, otters and other woodland creatures as the heroes – fighting for freedom from the rats, weasels, stoats and other nasties that try to invade their life, or the Abbey.

So, on the Redwall Day, the children dressed up as their favourite character from any one of the Redwall books. My boys chose the following:

  Tammo (a hare from The Long Patrol)

Matthias (a mouse from Redwall)

Rakkety Tam (a squirrel from Rakkety Tam)

Mark as himself – drawing the Redwall Abbey

There were puzzles to solve, quests to go on and a feast to be had.

All the families had to bring some food found in the Redwall books. I brought along "Wildberry Muffins" which were really packet-mix blueberry muffins. The older boys actually made these up and I just helped them with the can of blueberries. I made some Apple Scones. These are mentioned in some of the books but no recipe is included. This is how we made them:

APPLE SCONES

3 1/2 cups of SR Flour, sifted
1 tablsp soft butter
1/2 small can of baker’s apple, diced (about 200g)
1-2 cups of milk

Work butter into SR Flour with finger tips until combined (looks like fine crumbs). 
Add fruit and milk. Only add as much milk as is necessary to form a slightly sticky dough and stir only until it is just combined. 

Flour the counter and add more flour to help turn out the dough. Lightly flour  the baking sheet, top of the dough and cutting tool. Even a glass can be used!

Cut out (usually round shapes) and place on the baking sheet so that they are touching. 
Bake in a moderate oven for about 20 minutes or until the tops are a light brown.

Cool on tray before dusting off excess flour for presentation.

This recipe is my written instructions of what my mother always did at home (minus the apple). She never wrote her recipe down and I just had to estimate as she made scones one day. She has it down to a fine art while I am still learning…

Anyway, the boys had a great day and so did I. Thanks Luptons and all the hard working Mums. We look forward to the next day in just over a month when we will focus on the book, Mossflower.

They might be ready for war but Rakkety Tam looks ready to play!!

Until next time…

Posted on on February 27th, 2007