"The world is full of obvious things which nobody by any chance ever observes." — Arthur Conan Doyle

  As usual for Birmingham in the summer holidays, half of today was sunny and half was torrential rain and booming thunder. Guess which half of the day we filled with baking and which we went out geocaching ? At least we remembered our wellies!
  Last night was biscuit week on Great British Bake Off... All of us in the house love  a. fun art and b. gingerbread so today minibrum decided she wanted to try her own entitled 'teddy in space' ..I think she did pretty amazing !

  Baking gingerbread is fairly straightforward but due to the hob work involved it needs a good amount of supervision for younger children. The decorating kids can go wild with ! We halved the amounts from this recipe from BBC Good Food, but put an extra bit of ginger and some cinnamon in for an extra kick!Serve with a good hot chocolate...

  

After a messy morning and a tasty gingerbread snack we went out geocaching.
 For anyone who doesn't know, caching is basically a modern day treasure hunt. People hide a small plastic container or other cool bit filled with a log book and a couple of mini gifts and place the GPS co-ordinates for their hidden position, along with a couple of clues  on a website.
 You can then use a specific GPS machine or download an app to your phone. Find the cache, sign the log, take a mini thing leave a mini thing and go home feeling super awesome!

  I cannot recommend this as a hobby enough, you can do it almost anywhere, it is fantastic exercise, it adds a good level of excitement to walks and your whole family can do it. There are thousands of 'caches all over the UK and today we used it to our ( soggy ) advantage and stayed close to home. Pop in your postcode here, register and then read the guidelines here and off you go. Premium members pay but basic is free and just as wonderful.
 Just as a guide we live on the edge of farmland, a supermarket and an industrial estate ( all of which make for a lot of my nemesis : evil spiders ) and there are 10 caches within a mile of our house.
 On our way we like to make up stories around possible treasure and see what ( non spidery) creatures we can find !

Today we  found three and then the storm drove us home.

At least we had biscuits.