All the fun of the fair

The Junior Crafter's little school held their biennial Village Fair yesterday, and it was a wonderful day. The sun was shining, the birds were singing, and there was an air of festivity all about the place. The Fair also incorporated the *ahem* Grand Opening of our (not quite finished and not really how we wanted it but shh don't mention the war, it's not at all PC and we may seem ungrateful) new Junior Learning Centre which was overpriced   massively behind schedule  bungled  built as part of the Federal Government's Building Education Revolution. Our local federal MP put in an appearance and cut the ribbon. I'm hoping it will be completed by the time the Boy Genius commences school next February.

Anyway, back to the fair. The Bloke Who Lives At My Place organised races and games for the kiddies on the school oval, including the egg and spoon race, sack race and three legged races; some good old fashioned fun. I held the fort on the Cake Stall for the day, along with 2 other mums, and we simply couldn't keep up with demand! We had two trestle tables, which were completely covered and sold twice over, thanks to the generosity of our school community who baked and donated all the goodies which we sold.

My contribution this year was 4 dozen Anzac Cookies and two batches of my famous Chocolate Slice, a family recipe passed on to me by my cousin, who got it from our Great Auntie Jess, who I believe had it handed down from her mother (my Great Grandmother).
I'd love to share it with you of course, but I think that publishing a recipe like that on the internet would amount to some kind of sacrilege!
Hope you had a lovely cake filled weekend too :)

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.

Baking...and more baking

We have been very busy in the kitchen of late, although at the moment I'm baking in an old fashioned metal tin - at least I'm certain metal can go in the oven!)

Caramel Slice

The Junior crafter baked a delicious chocolate cake with pink icing and sprinkles (of course).

(She takes icing her cakes very seriously!)

And a banana cake using this recipe which was soooo yummy!

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

White Ribbon Day

Today is White Ribbon Day, the International Day for the Elimination of Violence Against Women.

To support this worthwhile cause you can purchase a White Ribbon - proceeds from the sale of White Ribbons and Wristbands go towards changing community attitudes through high impact awareness campaigns, and you can wear your White Ribbon to raise awareness of this worthwhile cause.

The Bloke Who Lives At My Place is having a morning tea at his work in support of White Ribbon Day, so I baked some White Ribbon cupcakes. I used black cases, and because I didn't want to introduce another colour I sprinkled the white icing with some sparkly edible gold dust; the White Ribbons on top are fondant.

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.

 

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!

Special Guest Contributor - Blogtoberfest Day 7

In the spirit of Blogtoberfest I am sharing the love - today's post will be written by The Craft Gypsy Junior Edition (7). Enjoy!

During the school holidays my two friends came over and we watched a tutorial called how to make a little teddy bear from fondant because we were making cupcakes (but we didn't eat the bears because we loved them so much!). The tutorial was super easy!

Mine is the green one in the middle.

One of my friends can't eat gluten so we had to use a special type of flour to make the cupcakes. They tasted exactly the same!

We also made flowers, letters and hearts out of fondant to decorate our cupcakes.

We had so so so much fun.

THE END

ps thanks for reading.

by The Craft Gypsy Junior Edition (age 7)

(mum helped with the link, I don't know how to do that yet).

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)