birthday

My "little" girl turned ten this week, a big mile-stone and she was very excited and pleased with herself for getting to such a great age.

 My other daughter bought her a cup-cake stand (pink!) as a present.  I have wanted one of these for quite some time, but no-one bought me one.  We now have one in the house, but I shan't be allowed to use it.

 My other daughter also made her cup-cakes to put on it and made decorations out of paper to stick on top of the chocolate cake that I made as her birthday cake.  It is a depiction of the family: Me, my husband and big sister, and a nice flower.

She got other cool pressies and had a sleepover swimming pool party, ate too much unhealthy food and felt quite poorly.  It is quite amazing how much noise six small girls can make inside a car on the journey between the swimming pool and home.

birthday cake

My big girl turned thirteen over the weekend,  a milestone to become a teenager, and a little traumatic for her mother, to be old enough to be the mother of a teenager.  Actually I am old enough to respectably be the mother of a child much older than that, but I am not.  In good english style she wanted to go to the pub for her birthday, so we went to the pub with friends and families and ate curry. very nice!

I made her a chocolate trifle cake (chocolate sponge with chocolate custard and cream) which is quite delicious, I have eaten too much ( I should not be left unattended in the same room as a cake).  I found a graffiti rendition of her name from here.  

I will not be applying for any food photography jobs.

fab cakes

I can bake a cake that  you can eat and taste quite nice, but mine would never be allowed into a cake competition.  I  look in awe at some of the a creations some clever cloggy people have come up with and day-dream.... (about eating them mostly).

above from100 layercake 

I love the big flowers. Jen Huang?

cake at little zosienka who also do beautiful illustrations.

 I'm sorry I have no link for this above, please let me know if you do.

above and below outrageous cake on rag-pony 

twirling betty

biscuits for christmas

 today I made some biscuits in pretty shapes from the Ready-Steady-Spaghetti- book.  It has lots of nice quick recipes for meals and sweet treats.

Then melted chocolate and sandwiched them together with a stick in the middle, like a lolly pop. 

 In the book the chocolate was very prettily stranded across the biscuits, not so on my biscuits, but I am sure they will still taste nice.

And I made cake for the trifle for pudding tomorrow, when I took the cakes out of the tins they had these nice shapes on them.
Happy Christmas to you all for tomorow, and to all those in Christchurch who have suffered another earthquake.

hearts and raspberries

 We have picked the first raspberries today, just a hand-ful

 I have bought some heart-shaped cookie-cutters, so today for lunch I made heart-shaped eggy-bread, and tin tomatoes, with Kaitia Fire chilli sauce.  Yum!  I made more than shown in the above photo, but I thought that minimal looked prettier. 

pink.

birthday cake

soft-marshmallow

The fantasy (above) and the reality (below).

I made a cake for nine year olds birthday.  It was chocolate with strawberry icing, and I made a magazine collage decoration for the top.

alas, when I lit the candles on the cake and walked from the kitchen into the sitting room, the candles set fire to the decorations head.  Hmm, should of thought of that one.  Hence the strange "bite mark".  But anyway this caused some hilarity and nine year old was still happy with the decoration so all good.  

ikea shopping treat

\my sister bought this for her baby boys bedroom.  I love the foxes hanging out tongue.

\I thought this was so pretty and fab.

This is a big scale panel, about 180cm wide. 

This is also mine.

Lovely cup cake paper things

These are plastic doily, place-mat type things.

These photos are not cropped or attended to properly, this computer is a bit cautious and I don't know how to sort it out.

We went to Ikea today, which probably isn't frightfully exciting if you live somewhere where you can get to an Ikea.  Living in lovely  New Zealand how-ever there is no Ikea! I know, it's cruel, especially when I got to the material section, I wanted to buy so many different prints, they were so cool.  I bought a couple of pieces, but I can only get so much in my suitcase.  Oh boo hoo, poor me.

birthday cake decorations

I thought this was such a good idea, making cake decoration out of paper, none of that fiddling around with icing and mini rolling pins, to make something that you wouldn't eat anyway.  All those grimy hands rubbing that icing around. 

And you can use anything I suppose, lace, glitter, paint, doily's, endless possibilities 

And anyway it was my husbands birthday today, he's not that keen on cake, or lacy, doily hearts, but we have two daughters and myself who need there to be a cake on a birthday.  So I took some inspiration from above cakes and tried to make a boy version.  So I painted/drew these little cartoons of him, being active and going crazy with the computer for work.

I cut the pictures out stuck them onto cocktail sticks and poked them into the cake.  And I put in some little hearts just because I could.  (It is not displayed very beautifully as he is a boy and he doesn't care about such things.)