Happy Birthday Samuel

I Had a blast earlier this week at my nephews 2nd birthday party.



Sam with his Aunt Sally


My sister put on the usual party food spread of sausage rolls, twiglets, tortillas, dips and for my dad some cheese straws. To finish the meal there was some lovely slow cooked chilli-con-carne, with chunks of beef....not mince. Present time was a hoot, Sam bless him, unwrapped some and casually put them to one side and asked for “More”, others he howled with delight and had to rip them open there and then. He will need to have his own little garage for the amount of tryches and ride on toys he has now. Christmass this year is going to be so much fun for Sam.

And then came the cake.



I was busy making the birthday cake on Sunday night whilst watching the NFL. I chose a standard Victoria Sponge from Nigella's How To Be A Domestic Goddess. This is probably the one book of hers I keep coming back to the most. It's easily worth £12 of any ones money.



I bought a kilo of baby blue sugar paste to cover my 9 inch/23 cm cake. I rolled out and covered the cake on Monday. The videos on YouTube, make this look a lot easier than it is. It arrives in a kind of hardish block. You treat it like a dough, knead and stretch it to warm it up and to make it pliable. For the 1st attempt I think I did OK. I had a go at some fancy building blocks. I also had a go at some letter icing for the first time. I would have liked more time to practise, however my cake supplies only came on the day of the party. And by the time I had got my sugar paste on the cake, cut out the building blocks. I only had about 30 minutes to ice the cake. I gotta say I got the hang of it after I remembered some tips from Rachel Allen's Bake series. The beauty of icing on the sugar paste is its quite forgiving, you can make a mess of it and you can scrape it off and start again, which I did 2-3 times. I am looking forward to practicing some more and getting the hang of it. I thought the red sparkly gel and green edible glitter gave the cake a bit of a WOW factor.




I was very busy on Sunday making the Sunday roast. I also made probably my favourite chocolate cake from Nigella's How To Be A Domestic Goddess. The delicious Chocolate Marsala cake is very tasty and heaven for dark chocolate fans, with its light almost moussey base and dark chocolate icing that sits on top. Only the best double cream poured over the top will do.