Feast of Our Lady of Mount Carmel 2015 (with a caramel slice recipe)

Despite the fact we had sick children today we had a small celebration  for one of our favourite Marian feast days - Our Lady of Mount Carmel.

Rogan made a double batch of Caramel Slice (recipe is at the end of the post) for us to have and then he made a "mount" of it on a plate and placed the 'Lady of Mt Carmel' Eden had made some years ago on top of it for a central piece.

As usual the children coloured in while I read aloud to them from any reading material we have on Our Lady of Mount Carmel.

Naturally we had to eat some of that delicious slice and the children had some caramel flavoured milkshakes, made with some home made caramel sauce that Vellvin had whipped up.

I of course needed something stronger than caramel milk and so had a beautiful cup of Caramel flavoured coffee as I read through our readings.

As it turned out this was probably the only time our sick little one sat up on her own for a while and so after this we snuggled down again on the lounge together.

All in all this was one of our least celebrated days but yes full of meaning and love.

OUR LADY OF MOUNT CARMEL -PRAY FOR US!!

"MOUNT CARMEL SLICE" (MILLIONAIRE’S SHORTBREAD)
Printable Recipe
Base:

250g spelt  flour

100g panella sugar

225g butter

Topping:

Toffee/Caramel:

200g unsalted butter

200g panella sugar

3 tablespoons golden syrup

397g tin of condensed milk

Chocolate topping:

200g milk chocolate

Prior to cooking you will need to heat the oven to 170 degree as it is cooked in two stages.

For the shortbread base, place the flour, panella and butter into a food processor and mis together to a smooth dough. Using your fingers, press the mixture into the tin and prick all over with a fork. Chill for 15 minutes before baking in the oven for 25-30 minutes until golden and firm. Set aside to cool.

To make the topping, place the butter, panella, golden syrup and condensed milk into a saucepan and stir over a low heat until the butter melts. Turn the heat up to medium, bring to the boil and then gently bubble the mixture for 5-8 minutes, stirring constantly to prevent catching, until thick and golden brown. Pour over the cold shortbread in an even layer and leave to cool. 

Lastly, melt the chocolate in a bowl over a pan of simmering water. 

Pour the chocolate over the cooled toffee and place in the fridge to set. Remove from the tin and carefully cut into squares.

Try to get some before the children devour it !!

Blessings to you and your homes,
 

Our lady of Mt Carmel... yes late too

Well it has been a week since the Feast Of Our Lady of Mount Carmelhowever I still want to share;the very little activity we did, as it really is so very simple to achieve.

In fact our children had me convinced that it was last Tuesday rather than the Monday anyway and as we had an unexpected activity that had to be done on Monday we really were not prepared at all, sigh!

So straight to the matter. I really did not want to do any of the complicated ideas we have done in the past, Our
About The Brown Scapular and some recipes to celebrate 
Crafts and cake we did in 2009
as if just was too hard for me this year and so I was trying to work out how we could at least make a cake to celebrate with.


I really couldn't think of anything that I could do quickly and then our  very clever girl Autumn, came up with the idea you can see above.


It is quite simple:
Take two very large blocks of chocolate then place on top  a printed out image from the computer. Then for the straps  of the scapular join them with two  very fat straps of licorice to complete.

Did I mention that is all there is to it?
By the Way don't leave that chocolate out for too long as I am sure it will be eaten very, very fast!


Blessings to you and your homes,
 

Our Lady of Mount Carmel Ideas

The Feast Day of Our Lady of Mount Carmel is on this coming Saturday.

As I am not planning anything spectacular and probably will do similar things to years past I am posting these links to Last year 2010 and 2009 Feast days celebrated in our home, as well as some plans I put together in 2009  as well as  some plans and ideas for 2010 and some lovely images of Our Lady of Mount Carmel

Within these links are craft ideas and recipes we have used for this feast day.

I am hoping that THIS year we will get to the Carmelite Monastery in Launceston, but as it is on a Saturday and our track record with feast days on a weekend, we will see.

I hope this will be of benefit to some of you ♥

Blessings to you and your homes
,

Our Lady of Mount Carmel our Home 2010

For this Feast day we used the plans for the day I had prepared fairly exclusively.

• Here is a picture summary of what we did~

I tried to keep our activities different to Last Year and I think we were successful in creating different and interesting favours.
We made a Scapular cake using the designs from Catholic Cuisine as a guide.
We also printed out and laminated book marks to add to our Feast Table collection.
We cut out small scapulars from paper coloured them in brown and then printed out tiny scapular images to go on them. Each person gets to keep one
Eden made a clothes peg Our Lady of Mount Carmel. It took her ages but turned very well indeed . See how Jesus holds a tiny scapular!
Another view of Eden's Our Lady of Mount Carmel. She used the image for our Book Marks as her guide.
I had visions of everyone making one like this but it was not a happening thing.
Arwen coloring in a picture of The Scapular from our Planning pages
Corbyn coloring Our Lady of Mount Carmel
Myffwyn coloring Our Lady of Mount Carmel
Moran coloring Our Lady of Mount Carmel
Autumn and Saxon had a great idea to make paper dolls of Our Lady of Mount Carmel and St. Simon Stock.
Autumn drew, Saxon colored and then they cut them out.
St. Simon Stock doll, with robe.
Our Lady of Mount Carmel with her dress. Jesus is a little doll that attaches to her dress.
Vellvin made a huge paper scapular.
The back view with Vellvin wearing it.
Front view of Vellvin wearing it.
All our favors large and small.
Our butterscotch pudding which is a caramel colour. This is a different recipe to the one I posted in the planning pages and a great family favourite. We ate this with some 'whipped cream mounts'
Minni caramel cheesecakes, this to was a new recipe to try something different for Our Lady Of Mount Carmel. So they are called " Mini Mounts"
These are the caramels we made, recipe on the planning pages too
Everything set and roaring to go.

Blessings,

Our Lady Of Mount Carmel

We celebrated Our Lady of Mount Carmel in less detail than I wanted.
I am told ( by certain of our children)I tend to over Schedule all the things I want to do for feast days and then I am disappointed that we do not do all I planned.
This seems to be a constant failing but I get so excited about the feast day and all that we could do for this celebration.
In fact I do this for any occasion we celebrate.
So we started the day off slowly. Getting other lessons completed and then we moved on to the Feast day celebrations.
We looked at many of the images that are available for Our Lady of Mount Carmel. We looked at some of the different on line resources ( I will link to these in my planning post, this one is long overdue as well, but if I don't do it now I will not get around to it --like my Ascension and Pentecost ones.)
We also reviewed the Brown Scapular and the story of St Simon Stock.
The children coloured in some of the various colouring pages that I had found from the colouring book we have and online.
I really do love this Icon. I don't usually like Icons but just this week I have come across this one and one of St Anne which I so totally like.

Any way back to our programme ♥♥♥
After this we read the book The Brown Scapular by Mary Fabyan Windeatt.

Actually before I started reading each of the children collected supplies to make a Lady of Mount Carmel. They were free to choose any type of materials they wanted. It was interesting to see what every one came up with.
Eden copied an image from the Book and drew it on Calico. She is embroidering around her image. Obviously she did not finish in one day. She is still working on it.
Here it is on the hoop being worked on.
Autumn cut out parts of an image and then backed them in Tissue paper including the Gold colour. She then used black marker pen to colour in the gaps.
Vellvin copied the image onto felt using coloured fleece to create her picture.
Rogan made his Lady of Mount Carmel out of Felt. He drew a pattern and button hole sewed up the sides. He then stuffed it with fleece and then put a pipe cleaner in and a wooden bead on for a head.
He glued the head on and gave Our Lady some hair and a mantle.
Jesus is needle felted and glued on. The scapular is felt cut out and glued on.
He is very proud of this work.
Saxon made a Paper Doll. He made a Doll pattern , coloured in the clothes. Then he made a mantle from paper and glued it on. Our Lady then was given some Yarn hair and a Scapular made form Yarn and bits of brown felt. Jesus was cut out, coloured in and glued on.
A great effort from our "less craft is best" boy.
Have you ever had one of those cakes that did not turn out. Well, the cake did, the decorating did not. Our cake decorating icing was too runny and all the colours just ran into each other.Because of this it is very difficult to see the images on the Scapular on the cake.

Prior to the cake, we had for dinner (not planned) Chips with gravy... well the gravy is brown and the chips are white, for purity. Does that count as feast food?
For sweets we had ice cream and Caramel Topping.

All in all I was fairly pleased with what we did and I was very impressed with the crafts the children did.
I do not know where Moran, Myffwyn and Corbyn put their drawings and so I have no photos of them as yet.

I hope to have my belated Plans organised soon and then post them. Why bother you say, well then I will have them sitting here ready for next year. ☺
Blessings,

Our Lady Of Mount Carmel

Due to the fact I haven't been able to get all my plans into one place yet. ☺
I wanted to just share some of these lovely images of Our Lady of Mount Carmel.
I will be sharing what we managed to do today later, and hopefully my plans( perhaps useful for next year.)




Blessings,