Icklegen and I made vanilla ice cream this week in my fabulous ice cream maker. What a great invention – no longer do you have to open the freezer every few hours to whisk your ice cream mixture by hand to stop dreaded crystals from forming. Would I actually manage to remember to do that, I wonder? I think not.

As I was washing up afterwards, including the two empty pots of cream we used in our recipe (I’m a bit of a stickler for clean recycling), I remembered making a very simple ‘telephone’ when I was a wee lass from a couple of yoghurt pots and a length of string. And I thought, what a great little idea for Icklegen and me.

It’s a bit fiddly for a toddler to make, as you have to puncture holes in the bottom of your pots, knot the string and then thread it through, but it takes all of 2 minutes to complete. Not even long enough for Icklegen to start hopping around with boredom. And actually, your toddler could get involved by decorating the pots with paint, coloured tape or stickers.

What I wanted was the end product so that we could have some fun calling each other on our yoghurt pot telephone. It took a little bit of effort to explain to Icklegen that she needed to hold the pot to her ear and keep the string taut while her mummy spoke into the ‘phone’. And then swap roles so that she was speaking and Mummy was listening. But we got there and enjoyed ourselves a lot in the process.

P.S. To finish, a quick plug for the cream used in our original recipe: Gippsland Dairy Pure Double Cream. It is thick, velvety smooth and so delicious you just want to scoop it out of the pot with a spoon and devour it. Plus, no added thickeners/nasties like so many varieties on sale (why, when the real thing is so much better?). And no, I haven’t been paid to say this; I just think that good things are worth sharing.