Jennieworld Today

I can’t remember if I’ve mentioned before, but my boys have their birthdays 17 days apart (very bad timing) and so this month has been my cake creating month! Firstly, my older son chose this pirate treasure chest cake.

He went through my Jane Asher book and decided that this was the perfect cake for him. I had to travel a fair distance to get all the bits and pieces to make it, but the look on his face when he got up on his birthday morning and saw the cake made it all worth while.

As I have said, seventeen days later and it was his brother’s turn. Between the pirate birthday cake and the chocolate easter cake which we made, I had had enough of cake by this point! However, our littlest couldn’t be left out, so I did him a ’surprise’ cake. He had been dithering between a superman cake, a spiderman or a tardis (Dr Who) cake, but in the end I managed to persuade him that a surprise would be nicer! I really couldn’t face the thought of trying to draw spiderman or the superman logo in icing this year!

So this is how the surprise for the second birthday worked out. A candy cottage, with a chocolate fudge cake hidden under all the chocolate finger biscuits and other sweeties. I used matchmakers for the roof, and stacked up chocolate drops for the chimney. I wasn’t quite so happy with this cake as I was with the treasure chest, maybe because I had no picture to copy and was working from my own imagination. However, my boy was more than happy with it, and once my family heard that I was a little disappointed with how it had turned out, they very obligingly helped to make it disappear extraordinarily quickly!

Of course, all this cake has done my diet no good. There were sweets left, of which I took two boxes to my good friend’s house as her whole family are very slim and really do enjoy their chocolate biscuits. At least this is now all over for another year. There’s another good reason to stop at two children - there would definitely be more shop bought cakes if I had any more birthdays to cater!