This week has just ... this month, it's not even a week, has just been so huge!
I was making a giant M&M but life life is messy ... stuff happens and I feel
like I can't put this video up without filling you in with all the crazy stuff
that has gone on over the last few weeks. So thank you all of you who have been
following the channel and seeing our comments on the videos we put up over
the last couple of weeks. Thank you for all your support and your prayers, we
really appreciate that. So we're basically, where to begin ... at the
beginning. My eldest son had an operation booked in
that's been booked in for a long time ... not complicated it was about a week
stay in hospital and he came through that so well, swimmingly well, he got out
after five days everyone was saying he was doing amazingly. He had less pain
than anticipated, it was really really good and then we came home. Next morning
he woke up in intense pain and started vomiting and swelling and by the next
night he had fevers of 39C and we brought him back in and it turns out he had a
hospital-acquired infection with a bacteria which is resistant to most of
your standard antibiotics. So they had antibiotics they knew that it should
respond to but the next week and a half two weeks it's all blurred all the days
are blurred ... filled with complication after complication and
bleeds and it was just a mess. Like at the lowest point I was sitting outside
the surgery, the surgeon came out halfway through ... I'm not going to cry ... Ok I'm good I can do this ... okay
surgeon came out so yeah the lowest point was when he had to have a second
surgery to drain all the internal bleeds, his lung was infected with the bacteria.
They were testing during surgery whether his heart was infected they weren't sure
whether it was or wasn't. A surgeon came out halfway through to say the
anaesthetist was concerned about him ... didn't think he was doing well during
the operation and they might have to take him up to the intensive care ward
afterwards depending how he tracked in recovery so they had another two-hour
wait after that I could see him and hold his hand and know that it was okay and
that was probably the lowest point for me ... probably not his lowest point he
could tell you stories of intense pain and stuff that's gone on that's just
been huge. But he's a trouper he's so, so determined and so strong and in recovery
he pulled through well enough that we could go back to the ward and so that's
where he's been since on really strong antibiotics,
waiting everyday and we feel like every day they say he needs to be here for at
least a week and the weeks are not becoming days. But he is progressing!
Hey, it's been a long time in hospital but I'm slowly getting better should be home in not too long.
By the time this goes up I truly hope that we're back home but for the moment
I've just been in here with him and Dave's at home with the other two boys
doing a champion of a job looking after them and thank you to everyone who's
dropped meals over for Dave and the boys and supported them while I've been in
here with James I really thank you, thank you, thank you! So that's um yeah
and before all this started I started making a giant M&M ... so I'll show you how
to do that now and they'll come back and tell you what we're gonna do with it 💕
To make the hard shell I'm going to use pastillage -- and for that we need icing
sugar, glucose syrup, water, gelatin and a pinch of cream of tartar and all those
recipe quantities will be on the howtocookthat.net website and there's a
link to that below. Take your gelatin and tip it into the water and immediately
stir that around. The water needs to be cold not hot.
Once you have stirred it all in you want to leave that to absorb all the water.
After a few minutes tip that into a larger bowl and then add the glucose
syrup on top. Then you want to heat that in the microwave until it's melted, you
need the bigger bowl when you heat it because the gelatin bubbles up when you
heat it up. Place the icing sugar and that cream of tartar into the bowl of an
electric mixer, turn it on and add in the hot gelatin mixture. Now you can mix this
by hand if you don't have an electric mixer it just might take you a little
while. Once it comes away from the sides and forms a ball tip it out onto the
counter and quickly knead it just to make sure it's smooth now this stuff dries
out fairly fast so as soon as it's ready put it into an airtight plastic bag
until you're about to use it. Next you want 2 bowls that when you put them
together they create a shape that's a bit like an M&M shape. Grab your bowls
and give them both a spray with cooking oil and then dust them with a generous
amount of cornflour. Now you just use your hand to gently rub it so that you
have a smooth even thin layer of cornflour
all over your bowl without any clumps or gaps. Roll out the pastillage and check that
it's big enough to fit the size of your bowl and then spray the top with a thin
layer of cooking oil just to stop it sticking to itself. Now use your rolling
pin to lift it up and place it over the bowl. Now quickly just lift and lower it
to get rid of any creases so that you line the bowl smoothly just like you
would if you were lining a pie dish with pastry. Then you want to cut around the
outside with a knife and leave that for about a week to dry out and set hard.
James is gonna be in the hospital for a week (first operation), so I'll just leave this here on the
counter and come back to it then. 1 week later and James is home from his
operation and doing really really well (So I thought at the time 😞) so I'm filming this while he's playing
PlayStation with Matt. The shape of this outside shell is a little bit flatter
than I wanted probably needed a slightly rounder bowl but this will be fine. I'll
pop that back into the bowl for support and fill it up with melted chocolate.
That is a lot of chocolate I'm gonna have to leave that to set overnight ... look
at that! Half an M&M now I'm gonna slightly
overfill the second half so we don't have any gaps inside our M&M and then I'm
just gonna flip the first full half and place it on top. This is gonna get a
little bit messy there we go. It is important that you try and line
the two halves up straight cuz once it's set it's not gonna move anymore. I also
have Jedd sitting in here with me reading he's getting so good ... n.a.v.i.g.a.t.e ... navigate! That's a big word.
Once that is set you can clean up any of the chocolate that's on the pastillage,
just scrape it off first and then once you've got most of it, just use some
warm paper towel to get the last bits off and then you can tip your M&M shape
out of the bowl. Now that looks pretty good but I'm not happy with the way the
shape is pointy around the edge. The good thing about pastillage is that it's
hard enough that you can scrape bits off it so I'm going to use a knife and use
that just to shave it back and flatten that around the edge. If you've
got a perfect bowl shape for this you might not need to do this but if you're
like me and the bowl is not quite right then you can just give it a little bit
of a carve to get it how you want it. Once you're happy dampen the edge and
put a really thin layer of pastillage over the chocolate that you can see, then
use a small bit of baking paper to smooth it down onto the existing shell.
Place the whole thing into a box just to protect your counter. Cut out an M and
add that on top and then spray it using food colour that's in an aerosol can you
can buy these from most cake decorating stores. Now I'm running out of this colour
I've used it for something else before so I'm gonna have to get some more in
the morning to do the other side. And when I'm looking under the M here I can
see some of the spray has gone underneath. So when you make this I'd
suggest using 'Contact' or thick sticky tape sort of thing, so that when you put
it on no spray can get under there. If you do have this problem that I've got
though you can just clean it up using a wet paint brush ... you can just basically
wash off the blue food colouring from where it's not supposed to be. Now my
plan wants to go buy more of this spray and finish it in the morning but I
didn't know that I'd be driving James to the hospital at 3:30 in the morning with
a fever and that that's where we'd be staying for the next few weeks! As I told
you the story at the start it has been really rough and crazy ... so fast forward
several weeks and that gets you to today. So now that James is a little bit better
I'm still staying here with him (in hospital) because he still needs help with
different stuff so I'm here with him and he's well enough now that I can
leave the room for a little while. So Dave has brought in the M&M for me and
the blue spray because I ordered another can of that online so my plan is
to finish that here at the hospital ... finish making the giant M&M for you.
I cannot guarantee the film quality so I might step to film it on my iphone but yeah
it's been a journey! I'm forever gonna remember this giant M&M as being
intertwined in this journey so now you can too. But if you wouldn't make one of
these for your friends they will make a great gift and I think we'll probably
give it to someone at the hospital who has been helpful through James' journey of recovery.
Mum said I could give it to who I wanted so I said I'd give it to you. "Oh thank you".
You were there in some of the worst nights! "Some pretty hairy times!"
That's amazing!
I love it! Thank you so much.
Thank you!