Imbolc - Part 2

It's been a few days, but I wanted to share a little bit about how our day went.  It started out as a lazy morning, but turned into a pretty busy day.  We started by going to breakfast, since my fiance was at work, it was just the 3 of us.  I excused Dragon Boy from lessons, seeing as how it was a holiday for us, but that doesn't mean he didn't learn anything. 

After breakfast, I stopped by my mom's house to borrow some mace before heading home to start our baking.  I'll post the recipes we used in a separate entry.  We started with our Sunflower Seed Bread first, since it had to rise.  The kids got to help measure, pour and mix, taking fairly equal turns.  Dragon Boy got to man the camera (we ended up with some pretty interesting pictures!).  Anyway, here's a pic of the finished product:

After the bread was set to rise, we made our first ever attempt at homemade butter.  Success!  It actually came out a little sweet tasting, and it was really easy to do.

Then, we tackled the dough for the honeycakes.  This one ended up being really sticky :)  but lots of fun.  When I stuck this one in the fridge to chill, and the bread dough was starting to look about ready for the next steps, I realized I coudn't find a single bread pan in my mother-in-law-to-be's kitchen.  So, we climbed back in the van and ran back to borrow one from my mom.  I'm lucky she lives so close.  On our way, we stopped at the library to return the books that were due, and I had to promise the kids we'd come back Monday or Tuesday to get more.

Back at the house, we finished getting the bread dough ready for baking, letting it rise one more time.  While it was rising, we started dinner, a baked beef stew and got it in the oven then got the bread in the other oven (I love that fact that my MIL has two ovens!).

Once all that was set, we made our Imbolc Crown.  I didn't print or write down the directions, so we kind-of winged it, but it turned out really pretty, and was a nice centerpiece when we sat down to dinner.  The kids had a blast helping put it together.

And, finally, we brought out the honeycake dough, rolled it out and cut it to bake.

Dinner was a huge success, almost the entire stew and bread were eaten.  I had made some of the butter into honeybutter for the bread, and then my fiance put some on the honeycakes as well.

After dinner and baths, we finally had time to read Imbolc stories, though we had talked about the meaning of it throughout the day.  I wanted to read 3 stories, but we really only had time for 2 (the Grandfather story and Kyle's Lesson) because the kids were so tired by then.  We read Meagan's Imbolc yesterday before bedtime.