A Birthday Cake to Remember

Here’s a cute guest blog from a lady from England. You might need to look up a couple of her references!

There are advantages and disadvantages of giving birth to your daughter on New Years Eve!

The advantages are obvious – I will never forget her birthday, I can do one lot of frantic gift shopping to cover both Christmas and birthday present, I can never quite find enough available small guests to warrant holding a birthday party on ‘The Big Day’. What a pity!

The disadvantages – on her day of birth, being woken by the fireworks at midnight when we’d both just nodded off (we both bawled our eyes out!) and not being able to find decent supermarket birthday cakes for love nor money between Christmas and New Year.

The amount of time and tears spend trawling round the shops after Boxing day looking for that elusive cake – whether it be Barbie pink, Spongebob Squarepants or hedgehog shaped, the search was usually fruitless and disappointing for all concerned.

Now I’m no domestic goddess by any stretch of the imagination but I came to the conclusion some time ago that I could probably produce something myself which would not only get me out of a sticky last minute shopping situation but also give mother and daughter some creative ‘us’ time doing something creative together.

Taking on the ‘hedgehog’ theme I found I could take advantage of the festive season by picking up an enormous plain Yule log (at a discounted price!) which would make an ideal hedgehog body.

I explained my ideas to my young daughter who immediately ‘wanted to help’.  We donned the aprons, rolled our sleeves up and got to work. I showed my daughter how to make chocolate butter cream icing and how to smear it all over the ‘hedgehog’ without getting it over the floor, herself and the dog. We carefully stuck white chocolate button ‘spines’ all over its body and used some liquorice allsorts for googly eyes and nose.

OK, it wasn’t the prettiest woodland creature you ever saw and I hadn’t even warmed the oven up, but my little girl was so impressed with our creation and that afternoon was full of fun and laughter, an hour or two of special time together which my daughter still recalls.

I’m sure when the time comes, I will not resort to similar means to produce a wedding cake for my daughter, I will order a ready-made one in good time. Whether it makes it to the table without being adorned with chocolate buttons and liquorice is another matter.

If you are not a domestic goddess like the author Joanne Garrick, you should order your special birthday cakes from www.eatyourphoto.co.uk. Or order a chocolate layer cake from MagicKitchen.com