Happy Birthday to...

my dear, sweet, kind, generous, thoughtful and all round wonderful friend Liesl.

Image credit

 I'm sorry I didn't have time to make you a cake m'dear, but I did find you this amazing sewing machine cake (yes, that's really a cake!) to drool over!

You can wish Liesl a Happy Birthday too: liesl [at] hoppobumpo [dot] com In case you were wondering, Liesl is of course turning 21.

Hope you have a perfect day HB.

Completed - Reversible Winter Pinafore

Buttonholed. Buttoned. Taken in a little. Unpicked. Restitched, taking care to line up the seams properly this time. Hemmed. Wrapped. Delivered to the birthday girl. Well received. Yay!

Pleated pockets made using this tutorial

Heart shaped pocket all my idea!

Vintage self cover buttons from the Op Shop.

Cake. Believe it...or not.

When I was little it was the done thing to bring a delicious cake or cupcakes to kinder on one's birthday. All the little kinder friends would gather around, sing a rousing rendition of Happy Birthday To You (you look like a monkey...aaaaaaand you smell like one too), and share in the deliciousness of a homemade chocolate cake or a marbled rainbow cake.

These days, it seems, things are a little different. Birthday cake poses a genuine risk for children with allergies, but also suffers because it doesn't fit in with the healthy food picture that we try to paint for our preschoolers.

These days (at my son's preschool, at least) the children still sing 'Happy Birthday' but the candles they blow out are glued precariously to the top of a strange looking 'cake' made from plaster of paris turned out of an ice cream container mold. This 'cake' has been decorated with a liberal amount of fleurescent paint and wildly sprinkled with glitter and confetti, but it's been around for a good many years and is starting to look a bit sad and sorry and not quite as festive as a preschooler might expect on his or her birthday!

So, my son's kinder teacher recently* asked me if I would make them a new 'fake cake', and of course I got on to it immediately.
By recently I mean sometime around July last year...but who's counting?

So here it is. I hope it was worth the wait! It is decorated with real fondant over two polystyrene 'cake' rounds. The candle holders are set into the top of the cake so the appropriate number of candles can be inserted for the birthday child. The cake has been hot glued onto the board and I'm hoping that once the fondant has set rock hard the whole thing will last a couple of years!

The First Birthday

My little man, referred to on this blog as Poor Point 3 or PP3, had his first birthday last week! We celebrated at home with a little afternoon tea for family and one or two close friends, it was lovely (apart from my constant state of shock that an entire year has gone by since he arrived!). Although I shouldn't really be surprised, he arrived after a 2 hour labour and his nickname at home is 'Speedy'!

The Birthday Cake, made by me.

PP3 is the sunniest, happiest little boy you would ever see. He is already walking, he is trying to talk and already has lots of words tucked away in his vocabulary, his favourites being 'more', 'book' 'milk' and 'Dee' which for some reason is the word he uses to refer to both his big brother and big sister (neither of whose names sound remotely like 'Dee').

Happy Birthday my gorgeous boy xx

Birthday update

Thank you for all the lovely birthday wishes last week. Here's some of the wonderful things that happened...

An abundance of beautiful birthday flowers...

Unbelievably good chocolate mousse cake...

from here:

The cake was a gift from my husband's boss and was hand delivered after same lovely boss sent him home early for my birthday lunch. I'm nominating her for World's Best Boss. Seriously.

Then, just when I thought things couldn't get any better:

A chocolate ripple cake made by my gorgeous sister and topped with two of my favourite things, strawberries and peppermint crisp. One end of the board is marked "kids end" because the rest of the cake was made with biccies soaked in Frangelico! Yum!

Poor Point 3 had his first taste of chocolate cake and loved it:

And I received so many lovely gifts, including earrings, whizz bang electric salt and pepper grinders and this very special necklace handmade by my Auntie Jo; the centre bead is all the way from Nepal.

 

And another birthday...

I am a lucky girl. Today I awoke to steaming hot coffee, 2 boxes of beautifully wrapped chocolates, a gorgeous new watch, 2 beautiful handmade cards (one of which has a dancing 'Y' on it I am reliably informed by the 4 year old), and a whole lot of love.
I'm looking forward to a lunch date with some special girls in my life, and The Bloke Who Lives At My Place has been ordered by his lovely boss to come home early. Yep, I am one lucky girl.

A Birthday...

Happy Birthday Zahra, my beautiful 8 year old girl. She is everything I could have wished for and more. High maintenance, and totally worth it! Love you sweet girl.

Preparations...

At my place tonight we have the makings of...

a cake...

a fairy garden...

and a very positive little gift.

Tomorrow the junior crafter is turning eight!

The funniest dessert ever - Blogtober day 25

Today is my little sister's birthday, so we all went out for birthday dinner here which was fun.

The food was pretty good, the service was great and the Margaritas were excellent.

But this dessert really 'takes the cake' (sorry, couldn't resist).

"Dr Tim's Sticky Date Pudding with Self Administering Caramel Sauce".

 *Dr Tim is our local GP, I'm pretty sure he's responsible for this frivolity.

It was delicious.

Happy Birthday J.

Birthday Cake

My son turned 4 yesterday - what a great excuse to dust off the old cake tins and give some fondant a workout!

I realised about halfway through that I was actually a bit more rusty than I had anticipated, which got me thinking about when was the last time I created a fancy-schmancy birthday cake? Surely not too long ago...I love cake decorating...I do it all the time...right?

Actually, it turns out, the last fancy cake I did was exactly one year ago, when my son turned 3. Oops.

Late apologies to my daughter for her 7th birthday cake which was truly a shemozzle (in my defence I was 7 months pregnant at the time), my long suffering husband (sponge cake from supermarket *gasp* ), my Mum, my sister and all the other people I DIDN'T make a cake for this year!

So the cake came together in the end, (except for poor Thomas the Tank Engine who was too big to sit on my train tracks). My son loved it, the yummy chocolate mud cake inside was a hit with the parents, and it was enormous so we'll be eating chocolate cake at my place for at least a week!

(Inspired by this fantastic cake)