SOS Day

As many of you already know the little village that we live in very proudly houses one of Ireland's RNLI lifeboats. We take great pride and pleasure watching it go out on a Saturday morning for it's practice from our kitchen window. Both Rebe and Benny are going to be lifeboat people when they are older. In fact, one day Rebe popped into the lifeboat station to ask them how old she had to be. Turns out she will have to wait another 11 years, but in the mean time we found a great way to be a part of and support the RNLI: Stormforce!

Stormforce is the junior RNLI supporters group and I just can't speak highly enough of it. When you join (for a mere 10 euro) you get a pack full of goodies. Above is Benny's pack that arrived yesterday. Every quarter the posties brings the Stormforce magazine full of stories and puzzles and competitions and news (I have it on good authority that Rebe and Benny will be appearing in the next issue!). Rebe's card to Stormy Stan

In the winter edition of the magazine we spotted that the 27th of January is SOS Day.
We decided to join in and do a bit of fundraising. I have enjoyed fundraising for various charities since I was a little girl and I don't think you can be too young to put yourself out to help a good cause. We did what we do best here Under Rainbows, and baked... about 60 life ring biscuits to sell for a donation on the 27th.

This is how to make them...

The best gingerbread recipe in the whole world from that I've had since I was a wee girl.

Ingredients:
8oz plain flour
1 level tsp baking powder
1 level tsp cinnamon
2 level tsp ground ginger
2 oz marg or butter
2 oz soft brown sugar
2 heaped tbsp golder syrup or honey

(this makes a normal amount of biscuits, double this for a gingerbread house and x4 to make 60 biscuits)

First melt sugar, butter and syrup in a bowl. Mix in spices.
Take off the heat and add flour and baking powder together then knead on a floured surface for a wee while until it's come together. Roll out the dough to about 5mm thick.Using a small tumbler or a circle shaped cookie cutter cut out lots of circles.

We then used a small bottle top to cut out holes in the middle of the circles to make life ring shapes.
These were baked in a preheated oven 180 C for about 10 min's, until golden brown. Leave to cool on a wire tray.

To ice, mix icing sugar with enough cold water to make it runny (but not too runny)

Ice the rings first with white icing
then add a 4 stripes of red icing to make them look like life rings
Rebe made a special biscuit for Stormy Stan,


and a couple of lifeboats for the local lifeboat crew.
So after our baking marathon we decorated a biscuit box to hold them in and also fashioned a little money box and decorated them with stickers from Benny's Stormforce pack.

Yesterday afternoon, after school we wrapped up warm and went door to door locally selling the biscuits in return for a wee donation for the RNLI. The kids did so well, they were very polite and sweet and were so funny explaining to people what they were doing..well Rebe did that Benny just ate biscuits and told people he WAS Stormy Stan ;-)
We came home when it started to get dark and we counted up the money they had raised...a grand total of 33.44 euro! which we will take down to the lifeboat station today along with the specially made lifeboat biscuits.

If you would like to make a donation to the RNLI please go here.

Wishing you all a happy weekend x