Filed under: ageing, children, growing up | Tags: birthday cake recipe, Birthdays, children, Food, getting older, growing up
It was my youngest 8th birthday on Friday , it feels so strange that this cute, weird kid has been in my life for eight whole years!
I don’t know if it’s just me but time seems to pass so quickly once they get to school . I wish I could capture just a second of each passing year and keep it somewhere safe so I never have to say goodbye to him being a kid. It’s not that I don’t want him to grow up its just sometimes I wish I could slow it down so I could savour it a bit.
I guess that’s just part of life, my mum’s 60 in a couple of weeks and I know she has struggled with that one. When I was younger I imagined that the person you were just got old like your body but I don’t believe that anymore. I think if your lucky, time just makes us wiser not older.
I ended up baking Jack a giant cake for his birthday.I started by baking one cake, but it didn’t seem big enough so I baked another one and stacked it on top, iced it and covered it in smarties (very retro!) it was well worth the effort and everyone was amazed by its sheer girth! It tasted pretty good too…
If you want to try it out I’ve included the recipe. The butter icing part is just an estimate as i had to go to the shops half way through for extra icing sugar and butter , but you basically just have to keep making the stuff until the cakes covered. I think I used roughly a box and a half of icing sugar and a whole packet of butter. YUM!!
Jack’s Big Birthday Cake
LAYER ONE-
4oz self raising flour (110g)
1 teaspoon baking powder
4oz of soft butter (11og)
4oz caster sugar (110g)
2 large eggs
1 tablespoon of cocoa powder
LAYER TWO -
repeat layer one
FOR DECORATION-
Butter icing -
1 and a half boxes of icing sugar
1 packet of butter
splash of milk to blend…
5 tubes of smarties.
Pre heat the oven at 180oc and grease a large round cake tin (I used a 22cm tin)
Put the sugar and butter into a mixer and blitz, then add the sifted flour, cocoa, baking powder and eggs and blitz again.
Pour into the tin and bake for around 30mins or until cake looks brown and the centre is bouncy to the touch, then put on a rack to cool…
Do the same thing again for the second layer of the cake…
When both layers are cool, make the butter icing by mixing the soft butter with the sifted icing sugar and a little milk or warm water (there is usually an exact recipe on the sugar box) I had to do this in batches as I don’t have a giant bowl and find it easier to mix a little at a time.
Cut the rounded top off the first cake so its flat and spread a layer of butter icing on top then place the other cake on top and cover the entire cake with the butter icing. once this is done decorate with whatever you like, I used 5 tubes of smarties coz I like the colour combination but you could use dolly mixtures, buttons, dark chocolate shavings, the only restriction is your imagination!
Helenx
Oh how i am loving the bright chilly weather at the moment, its great to see the sun after so much gray and feel the bite in the cold air!
i have discovered a love of cooking this winter and it got me thinking about how my cooking habits have changed during the years. i come from a family of cooks, my mum was always baking something when i was young. The highlight of her baking year would be our harvest festival when she would bake our school center piece, it was a giant bread creation in the shape of a wheat sheaf ( a bit bizarre i know) and when i was very small i would be immensely proud carrying this giant thing down the church isle where it was surrounded by all the other children’s offerings of veg and tins of fruit! but i remember as i got older the whole thing became less cool until in the end when i used to secretly wish it would get burned in the oven or that I’d drop it on the way to school!
But now i have my own kids i get what mum was doing it for, that nurturing feel-goodness of cooking something special for your family or freinds brings out the domestic goddess in us all , there is no longer an anti-coolness about cooking something from scratch in-fact i think its now the opposite. Cooking seems to be everybody’s thing at the moment, with the very sexy nigella selling her wonderful brand of guilt free domestic bliss, i love the way she devours the food in her fridge at the end of each show!, its refreshing to see a sexy women on telly enjoying her food so much!
Oh all this talk of food has got me thinking of tea, maybe I’ll go rustle up a giant pan of toad in the hole. I can start the diet tomorrow!
Helen Fry
