Sorry to disappoint but this isn’t a post on yummy scrummy recipes. Although I can happily provide that if you like?! Instead I’ve been having a bit of a ‘moment’ on the whole issue of sweet treats for the girls.

As kids we ate very healthily. All home cooked meals and the like. Plus we had what we called ‘A Friday Night Treat’. Every Friday my stepdad would come home with a special cake or doughnut for us and in the summer we could choose an ice cream from the village shop on our way home from school. We did have other bits and pieces but these were our big treat. It wasn’t that my mum was strict, just that we didn’t have it, nor did we crave or pester for things. In the main anyway!

Fast forward a few (Ok a lot of) years and for some reason my rationing of treats for the girls has gone to pot. Completely. I thought I’d like to do the same Friday night treat thing but along the way and in a fuzz of negotiating the trials and tribulations of motherhood I kind of forgot. Instead it seems to be an ‘every night treat’ or even a ‘two or three times a day treat’.

Please don’t judge me but in a normal day the girls will probably have at least 2 biscuits and then more often than not a bit of chocolate. Not a full on Mars bar I might add, just a few choccy buttons. And then there is the cake. On that note for those of you that don’t know I also make A LOT of cakes and so my house is always full of cake off cuts from wedding cakes or new recipe testing. There are also copious bowls of buttercream floating around my kitchen and the girls will often be found waiting eagerly for me to finish with it.

I am not strict about what they eat, as you can tell. They eat home cooked meals with a healthy dose of pasta and fish fingers! But on the whole it isn’t what I would call junk food. It isn’t always packed full of veg because they just won’t eat it but I figure it could be worse.

And recently I wondered if I have gone a bit wrong somewhere. Am I setting them up for a lifetime of dealing with a sweet tooth or is it actually the opposite in that allowing them to have it they don’t become crazed sugar fiends when at someone else’s house.

I could give a million and one reasons to justify my choices but in short I really don’t mind them eating a few biscuits. When you are trying to juggle two toddlers it sometimes became easier to reach for the biscuit tin than some carefully prepared crudités (which they won’t eat anyway BTW). I will also say that the girls are pretty healthy and both have excellent teeth with no concerns from their Dentist.

It’s not that I can’t make healthy snacks. I can concoct all manner of healthy treats that would fool anyone in to thinking they were eating a calorie laden sweet fest but for some reason I just haven’t quite cracked it with Molly and Alice. I did try some super healthy ‘chocolate’ flapjack bites for Molly’s lunchbox the other week but they came back uneaten. I get the girls involved in the baking but it doesn’t seem to fool them. Alice is a bit better and will eat the ‘healthy’ biscuits but Molly not so much. I did feel a little bit better this week when Charlotte told me that Mabel had woken up and asked for a McDonalds for breakfast!! She blames the grandparents…

So with this post I am either going to find some fellow secret biscuit feeders or realise the extent of my girl’s sweet teeth. Either way I’d love to hear what you give your littles in the way of treats, if anything at all. And any suggestions for breaking my habit of reaching for the biscuit tin.