Cooking Bannock Bread

As many of you know our family is involved in Scouting. Sam is in Beavers and Tyler is a Cub now. Simon and I are Scouters in both sections this year. With that we need to up our knowledge of all things Scouting. You know what they say - Once a Scout- always a pyromaniac!






Along with learning fire skills I want to learn good techniques for making Bannock bread.

I want the kids to be able to make their own bread using individual clay pots. The best thing to do is test out the activity - just to make sure it will work, or to make any adjustments in advance.








 I always wanted to see if steel wool really aught fire that easily. yes, yes it does!

So we did not use a chimney to start our briquettes - the first attempt. It starts, it gets hot, but not hot enough or quick enough.













I cleaned the pots, greased them up and placed tin foil in the bottom. I decided to chuck the foil and do without it. Which was fine, it cooked well, no issues. Its not like we placed the pots in the fireplace directly.

Simon found a recipe on allrecipes.com for bannock bread. Add water and melted butter.

Put it all in a ziplock bag, mush around for a while, let it rest for a bit...

Put them in the pots, cover and cook.

at first I thought it would take 20 minutes, but it was more like 40 minutes. Next time they will not be so big.

We did not have a chimney for briquette starters, we will shortly. So we had to improvise, a metal empty coffee can worked well for our second attempt. The coals got real nice and hot.

It was super easy

As you can see the bread slips out really easily (notice the wine - at a Scouting event there is no alcohol - hence why we test at home!)

And VOILA! Bread cooked in my driveway. YUUUUMMMMMMMYYYY

Scouts Campfire Blanket

I am a Scout Leader for Beavers. Now Beavers don't normally go camping, but I love camping, so the Beavers are going camping. This past mid-September I brought my group camping, outside, in tents! Now you may say, what's the big deal? You go camping all the time. Well, Beavers starts at the tender age of 5 to 7! Many of the Beavers never slept in a tent, let alone away from their parents, let alone SLEPT OUTSIDE!

Well, my Beavers were AMAZING! Not one was afraid, not one had an accident, and we were all snug as a bug in a rug. And it was COLD! Now I wanted to have my campfire blanket ready, to show off, but my timing was off. They are now ready for our winter camping trips.

Last year we bought some nice wool and fleece to sew our Scouts campfire blankets. I started the project, but like many other things in life, I ran out of time. So I started the project again before my Beaver camping weekend a few weeks ago. I was rushed and I did not like the results.We decided to scrap the idea of having fleece sewn on the wool. It will be too bulky with the fleece.

Now you just cut up the middle to form a poncho. We serge the edges, then we sew on the badges.

 The campfire blanket is a record of your adventures in Scouting. When you swim up from Beavers to Cubs you remove your badges and sew them on to your blanket. Any awards, Beaver tails, crest etc... you sew on.
It is also a means to keep you warm by the campfire and on those cold nights where you sleeping bag just isn't warm enough.

 I had to sew everything all at once, which I don't recommend! It took forever. I had to baste all the badges on as the blanket is heavy and cumbersome to manoeuvre. The badges kept falling off.
Plus you have to change your thread for each different colored badge.

But going forward it will be a quick process to sew them on. The only hard part is deciding where to put sew it on!
Now on to Tyler's blanket! He has a LOT of badges, Beaver tails, and activity crests. I may leave it to next weekend!