Make it: Lunchbox banana trickery

Here's a little trick to boggle and mess with the minds of your wee one first day back at school - give them a banana that has already been sliced inside!

Now there's two ways to go about this, the correct way (read: hard way), and the easy way...

First, the right way: You will need a banana that is ripe enough to already have some black spots on it, so that the tiny holes you will put in the skin won’t be noticeable. Then you need a very fine needle that is long enough to go from one side of the banana to the other, threaded with about 30cm (12 inches) of thread.

The idea is to put a loop around the banana, but inside the skin. You will notice that the banana has 5 or 6 or so ‘corners’. Push the needle into the banana at one corner, and run it under the skin through to the next corner, and out. Pull the thread through, but leave a tail of thread at the beginning. Now push the needle back into the hole it just came out of, and through to the next corner. This time leave a little loop at the corner where your needle went in. Continue in this way around the banana, until your needle comes out of the hole where you started. You now have a loop around the banana inside. Now you pull gently on both the ends of thread that are emerging from that one hole. The thread will slice the banana and get pulled out of the hole. Be careful when pulling the ends that you pull them in the directions in which they are already travelling, otherwise they can tear the hole.

And the easy way: which I saw Jamie Oliver do once, is to pierce the banana with a needle and just slide across the banana until you've run it all the way from one side to the other. Repeat this all the way down the length and you'll get the same effect with only one black mark for each slice...