Toby’s 3rd Birthday

On Saturday, my baby boy turned 3.

The children spend Saturdays with Liam, but I did get to quickly open some presents with them before he picked them up…

I’m not sure if it was a clever or self-punishing idea to buy him a CD player, but he & Izzy seem to love it so far!

They then went to spend the day with Liam – swimming followed by a pirate party with all his family – and I went to Exeter for shopping, Yo Sushi and Fro Yo (I will do a post on that another time!) with my Mum and little sister.

On Sunday, we had a smaller party for my family. Lemon and “slime” fairy cakes…

More presents (Toby now has lots of clothes that actually fit, yey!)

Plus a huge digger truck from his Auntie Livvy…Toby’s favourite present for sure!

As Toby had already had a proper birthday cake the day before (Liam stayed up til 3am Friday night/Saturday morning making an amazing pirate ship shaped cake!) I just recycled a chocolate orange cheesecake that I’d made for Christmas, but had been put in the freezer as no one had any room for it on Christmas Day! Still tasted really good after 10 days in the freezer

And, as with most family gatherings, there were a few family photos taken at the end…

I can’t believe how big my baby is getting! He starts pre-school tomorrow and is so excited! He doesn’t get funding until Easter (as the cut off is January 1st and his birthday is January 5th, annoying!) and the pre-school didn’t have anymore spaces anyway, so he is only going one afternoon a week for now. I’m hoping that by paying for that one session for this term, he will then be in the right place to get first dibs on any other sessions that come up in the future – from Easter he is entitled to 15 hours funded by the government, but at the moment the pre-school doesn’t have any more spaces until September! I’m crossing my fingers that he loves pre-school as much as we all think he will. It is the same one that Izzy went to, but whereas she had already been to nursery and a child minder by this age, he hasn’t really spent much time away from me before. Haha, worried “Mummy” ramble over…I’ll try not to cry tomorrow!!

I’ve just realised this is my first post of 2013…don’t know where that time’s gone! I hope you’re all having a great start to the New Year!

Fairy Butterfly Garden Cake

This afternoon, Izzy is having a joint birthday party with 3 other friends. Her actual birthday was almost a month ago, and she had a beach party for family the weekend before, plus a trip to Paignton Zoo on her actual birthday, and she considers our trip to Butlins to be part of her birthday too...so this is the 4th and final celebration!!

I made the cake yesterday ready to take today, so I thought I would share some photos of it. It is a whopper 8 egg cake - a double recipe of my favourite lemon drizzle cake, baked in two 9 inch square pans.   Izzy and I first made the decorations in the morning, using butterfly and flower cutters from Lakeland, plus coloured roll out icing.  

Then last night, I set to making the cake. It was the first time using the oven in this house to bake with, so I was a little nervous. Bizarrely, the cake on the middle shelf took 30 mins to cook through, whereas the one on the top shelf took at least another 10 minutes?! All was well in the end though, once they were out of the oven I drizzled them with a mix of lemon juice and caster sugar and left them to cool.

I wasn’t sure how much butter icing I would need to cover the cakes, so I decided to make more than I’d probably need – 250g butter, 500g icing sugar + the zest of one lemon, lemon juice and a tiny amount of green food colour gel. In the end I used almost all of this!

I normally find it really difficult to ice the sides of cakes, so I decided to ice this one layer at a time, rather than just putting icing in the middle first and then trying to do the sides once it is a double layer cake. Although, not surprisingly, it was much easier to ice a square cake than a round one so it didn’t take too long in the end, yey!

Then it was Liam’s turn to do the fiddly piping to make some grass. We drew a rough design and did a bit of practising on a bit of paper first!

And then it was time to get decorating…

Grass…

Plus flowers…

A (bought!) fairy…

And finally butterflies…finished!!

I took more photos in better light this afternoon…can you tell I’m very pleased with how it turned out?!! Haha, sorry for the photo overload!!

I’ve got six pink candles to put on it too, but I’m leaving that til the last moment as I don’t want to spoil it!! I’m not looking forward to cutting into it either, sob (!), but I figure that as it is square that will be a lot easier – because it is a joint party, each child has only invited 8 friends each, so I reckon I’ll be bringing at least half the cake back home again later!!

Right, I’m off to finish getting ready for the party, I’ll be back tomorrow to tell you how it went We went to the beach this morning and the waves were a bit rougher than I’d realised so my “paddling” led to my shorts and top getting soaked…change of clothes needed!!