A few nights ago, my oldest daughter (6) woke me up in the middle of the night. She was so excited and wanted to go downstairs and start cooking. When my brain was a little more coherent, I gathered that she had a dream of cooking an "eggy cake" and that the recipe of how to do it was still bouncing around in her little head!

Well, I convinced her we weren't going to do it right away and that we could try on Wednesday when she didn't have school. By the way, at our school in the Netherlands, the younger kids don't have school on Wednesdays, and when they are older, they only go for half the day.

Well, what is a parent to do but to try and make dreams a reality....

Today we finally did the recipe according to the very vague instructions of the dream with a bit of input from mum to help possibly improve the outcome of the cooking! The first things that were required for "eggy cake" are eggs, so luckily we had lots of those that we needed to use quickly anyway. So 3 whole eggs, to fit with the 3 bowls that we were going to use!

She is pretty good with her hands, surprisingly dexterous since she was small. She has helped me when I need to mess around with electronics that I found hard to get my hands into since she was about 4. So, it fairly likely that we are not going to be eating a crunchy shell in the cooking... Probably!

The dream recipe called for lemon, water, sugar and eggs, but we decieded that maybe milk would be better than water and that maybe a touch of cinnamon would also be nice. Of course, once the cooking started, everyone wanted a piece of the action.

Apparently, part of the recipe in the dream was that it needed fruit. So like any responsible parent, we let our young daughter cut away with knives and other sharp objects.

Meanwhile, if you've never come across an apple corer, this is one of the best inventions ever! Get one for every kitchen that you own! In our case, it is one.

And so, with little fuss we had our base of fruit. that the "eggy cake" would be poured into.

Good help can be quite tricky to keep around. Although in our case, "good help" would be stretching the truth a little, let's just say it was well intentioned help.

The dream recipe was a little loose on details about how long the "eggy cake" needed to be in the oven. So we winged it with 150 Celcius (who knows what this is in Fahrenheit, no one uses that anyway...) for around an hour. Also, the bowls needed to be cooked in a water bath, a bit like a custard (shhhhhhh!!!!).

And VOILA, the result. Which in the end was surprisingly nice and not the expected disaster! A very pleasant lunch made from the memories of a dream of a 6 year old! Next time we are going to try with different fruits, apparently blueberries and mango are going to be the next experiment....