The First Bagpuss annual contains a number of games and things to make. One of these is a recipe for sugar mice.
Madeleine and the mice first collected:
8 Ounces of icing sugar
Half a lemon
A small egg
A bottle of pink colouring
A packet of hundreds and thousands
Two bowls
Two cups
A wooden spoon
A sieve
A teaspoon
And a lemon squeezer
Then they were ready to start.
First they sieved the icing sugar into a bowl. Then Madeleine broke the egg and cleverly separated the white from the yolk by passing the yolk from one half of the egg-shell to the other over a cup until only the yolk was left in the egg-shell, and the white had dropped into the cup.
Then they mixed the white of egg and the icing sugar together with a wooden spoon and added lemon-juice drop by drop until the mixture was soft and podgy but not running.
They took one dessertspoonful of the mixture and put it in another bowl. Then they added the pink colouring drop by drop until it was pink all through. Then they took lumps of the white mixture and rolled and pushed them into the shape of mice. They used tiny bits of pink icing for ears and hundreds and thousands for eyes. For the tails they used pieces of string stuck into the icing.
When it was all done they had twenty-three white mice with pink ears lined up on a piece of grease- proof paper and one small pink mouse with white ears because they had some pink mixture over.
The mice wanted to eat them at once but Madeleine said they should wait until they were set, about three hours, and anyway they should offer Bagpuss one first. But she let them finish up the hundreds and thousands.