As a parent, there are many moments in the life of your child/children when you could use the phrase ‘proud parent’ moment.

Proud Parent. Is this an over used phrase? Possibly not.

We should rightly be proud of our children as they continue to reach certain milestone in their lives. Their first steps, eating their first solid foods, potty training success, starting school, their first Christmas performance and finishing school. And everything in between. This past half term we have – as have most parents with children the same age – been on an emotional rollercoaster. Noah finishes his infant part of the school and is ready to go up into ‘juniors’. His final, year-end assembly was a general highlight of his past year and sung to one of the songs from ‘The Greatest Showman’ had me in tears, I was in bits!

Noah’s sister on the other hand actually finishes primary education this year! Where the hell did those years go??!! In the final run up to the end of term we’ve had the SATs results.  Results to be proud of, bearing in mind she has dyslexia, they are pretty amazing. We have a Prom to prepare for (whether or not a primary school should have one is out for debate) and the end of year, end of school final, end of days assembly to watch. I don’t think I will be able to cope. Tissues will be at the ready, in bulk form. I then have to go on a 4 hour WebEx meeting afterwards! It’ll be something of an anti-climax.

But, who is proud of whom?

Are we proud of our children, or are we proud of ourselves for getting our children safely to this point in their lives? Should it come as such a surprise that after all the hard work, love, sweat and tears that our little bundle of joy/s has attained such giddy heights in life as to have done what they have done? We have loved and cherished every moment of there so far, short lives. We have worked hard to get them to eat properly, with a knife and fork (mostly), we have ensured that their diets are healthy and their plates have been full. We have run around the house with the potty, and cleaned up afterwards when they missed. We have taken them and picked them up from school as often as we can (as working parents we can only do so much). We have taken them to and from the various clubs.

We have in fact, put just as much time into this relationship as they have, so quite rightly, we should be just as proud of ourselves as we are of the little cherubs and their feats of success and progression.

God bless the parents – we do an amazing job and to see all our hard work burst into song on stage at the end of year play – cry for all the tea in China – because you can and you should.

And may you enjoy this little cake with friends after the morning assembly, with either a cup of coffee or a stiff G&T to calm the nerves. Dollop on a spoon of yoghurt or clotted cream and away you go.

Preheat the oven to gas 3/170c/150c fan and line and grease an 8″ deep cake tin.

For the cake;

• 40g pistachio nuts (no shells)
• 50g hazelnuts

Place these into a food processer and ‘blitz’ until you have a fine breadcrumb mix. No more than 2 minutes should do the trick. Remove from the bowl and put to one side.

Then;

• 170g soft butter
• 140g gluten free self raising flour
• 50g ground almonds
• 50g light brown sugar
• 90g runny honey
• 3 eggs
• 1/2 teaspoon baking powder

Place all the ingredients into your mixing bowl (I used a table top stand mixer) and beat them all together until light and fluffy and fully combined. Beat for a bout 4 – 5 minutes and then pour into the cake tin.  Sprinkle over the blitzed nuts on top of the cake batter and bake for about 40 – 45 minutes. Or until an inserted skewer or cake tester comes out clean.

Take out of the oven and place the cake, in its tin, onto a large plate.

Whilst the cake is in the oven, you can prepare the honey syrup;

• 200g runny honey
• 4 tablespoons of water
• 1 1/2 teaspoons of Rose Water

Place the 3 ingredients into a small saucepan and over a low heat, warm the liquid up. This should only take a couple of minutes, it doesn’t need to be boiling hot, just warm enough to liquefy the honey and warm enough to combine the ingredients.

Once the cake has been removed from the oven, pour over half of the honey liquor and allow this to fully soak into the cake – 20 – 30 minutes.  Then finish off with the 2nd half of the honey mix.  When pouring over the cake, make sure you pour some liquid around the edge of the cake and tin – leave no surface in-covered.

Allow the cake to then fully absorb the liquor – and fully cool –  before carefully removing the cake from the tin and serving. It’ll be quite rich, so careful on the slicing.