This recipe is a slight variation on one found over at the Chelsea sugar website. I have used my old “include the feijoa skin” trick to make this loaf extra feijoaey.
Ingredients:
10 small feijoas
1 cup boiling water
1 cup white sugar
50g butter
1 free range egg
2 cups self-raising flour
1 teaspoon baking soda
Instructions:
Preheat oven to 180°C (356°F).
Wash feijoas and cut off the flower end. In a food processor, grate feijoas, skin and all (should be about 1 cup once grated).
Combine grated feijoa, boiling water, sugar and butter in a pot, and warm on the stove until butter is fully melted. Remove from heat and beat in the free range egg.
Sift flour and baking soda together into a bowl. Make a well in the centre, and pour in wet ingredients. Fold ingredients together until combined.
Pour into a greased loaf tin. Bake at 180°C (356°F) for 45 minutes or until the loaf springs back when touched.
What the kids can do:
Hand washing: Don’t forget to get the kids (and grownups too of course) to wash their hands before you start. Little hands always seem to end up touching everything, including the ingredients. This is extra important given the current Covid-19 situation. For good 20 second hand wash, have them sing “happy birthday to me” twice.
Feijoas: Miss 5 likes to chop up the feijoas with a butter knife (for safety). Chopping them up is not strictly necessary, but she likes to do that job, before feeding them into the food processor and pushing them in with the plastic depressor. Bear in mind that little hands can fit down the shoot of the food processor, so always supervise this step.
Eggs: Pro tip for breaking eggs with a 5 year old, break eggs into a separate glass bowl before adding to your other ingredients. That way you can see and pick out any bits of shell before they are added in by mistake. I like to use free range eggs, because it is kinder to the chickens, and they also taste better. Bear in mind that raw eggs can carry Salmonella so wash little hands if they end up the raw egg. I also don’t recommend eating raw cake batter, just in case.
Mixing the ingredients: My daughter helped mix all the ingredients. The biggest messes seen to happen when sifting and mixing dry ingredients with the kids. A great tip from reader Dana M is to put a towel down underneath, which catches any stray ingredients for easy cleaning. When folding wet into dry ingredients, you want to mix thoroughly, but not too much or the loaf will go flat. This usually requires the grown up to either finish off the mixing and/or intervene before things are mixed too much.
Keeping Them Occupied 