ryan's birthday cake!

well, talk about a slack blogger!

Ryan turned 7 a few weeks ago - it's not party year here for him (though how is it that somehow a celebration with 2 friends turns out as big - and expensive - as a party, by the time you get all the family there?! lol) so we went to AMF bowling to play a few games. Food was simple - popcorn and chips, with a superman cake.

once i started decorating the cake i got total stage fright at how to do it without ruining it - i don't even own a piping set anymore! (recommendations please, not the TW piping ball, ugh!) - before i thought to use my printed out logo as a stencil rather than inspiration ;) made the job much simpler than expected!

the black gel spoiled it a little i think, it didn't have a nozzle so putting it on evenly was rather difficult.

The Fairy Party (GF)

well, I ended up deciding that 25 kids were far too many to cope with, even at the park and went with 3 (we do one for each year and I forgot she was turning 4 haha as it is we had all the siblings join us and had a total of 10 kids lol)

I still went for the original menu ideas as I still needed easy.

to make the fairy cups I looked for some suitable bought gluten free biccies but no such luck, so I used a sugar cookie recipe from the new GF baking book i had bought in January. I'll post the thermomix conversion later but they were very nice! you'll have to excuse the photos, I'm still having to use my camera phone as we can't afford to replace our camera atm.


I used gluten free marshmallows I'd found in a discount store (they were a little tall and thin), Allen's Freckles, musk Lifesavers and icing coloured with a little cochineal. they were a hit and I had ended up with nearly 40 cookies so, after they were taste tested by the family, i was able to make enough fairy cups to send to school too.


for the cake, I attempted to make another 'rainbow' cake but used this recipe instead - disaster! the recipe was far too runny and i ended up with a cake that had a vague brown colour through the middle with a pinkish layer on the bottom and a chocolate layer on top LOL I also had my usual disaster with over-colouring the icing but was assured it was "Tinkerbell green" not to mention how shockingly the icing was applied (but i didn't realise til i saw the photos!) lol Rora loved it so that's what counts!


the birthday party went well too by the way, but the 4yo attitude could do with some work ;)

Ryan's birthday party

didn't go exactly according to plan food-wise, as i had been so sick before-hand (really only came good on the friday). here is what i was planning and here is what we ended up with, i wanted it to be as close to gluten free as possible:

• mini frankfurts (aldi american hot dogs cut into 3 pieces each)
• mini sausages (what are they called? these were the peppercorn brand ones)
• cheese sticks (the aldi brand)
• cherry tomatoes
• some fruit (the kids ate 2 full platters of cut up fruit!)
• fairy bread (i made a loaf of GF breadmaker bread but it was a disaster so we ended up with a gluten and a GF version) with GF sprinkles / 100's & 1000's (they also had all natural colours)
  

• nachos & pumpkin soup for grownups

• a GF caramel mud cake (this did not work well - it tasted nice but was as hard as a rock. well, nearly) for the birthday cake with a wall-e topper and some GF candy-coated mini choc chips (Blackwood brand)
  
• and (phew) huge GF cupcakes with a buttercream frosting and jelly crystals (which have virtually no colour so kind of pointless!)

afterwards i put out some Woolies "Free From" brand plain chips and some of the aldi twisties for the kids to eat. I had a stash of lollies but by the time we'd handed out chocolate freddoes and GF lollypops as prizes for various games, as well as the size of the cupcakes! I decided they'd had enough sugar ;)

The day before his birthday he had taken pattycakes to school - his request was carrot cakes and while i thought the kids would not be keen apparently they went down a treat, after his teacher told them they had baby carrots in them LOL they were topped with buttercream frosting and sprinkles (not gluten free as we didn't have any at home, just for school)

still can't believe my boy is 6!!!

Happy first birthday to my blog!!!

(not an April fool's joke lol)

i missed it! this morning i was wondering how long i'd been blogging now, not thinking it would be a year but thinking it must be getting close - i started on 26/3/08! i can't believe it's been a year already!! i wish i had added my counter when i first set it up but i really didn't expect to get anyone but me and a few friends occasionally here :)

if i was a good blogger i would have baked a birthday cake to photograph LOL instead of forgetting ;) hehehe ah well...

Just to make Damian jealous...

hehhehe


it was Geoff's birthday today so I decided to make him this cheesecake (and yes, that is the infamous cauliflower tagine i've been waiting for!) unfortunately violet crumbles and crunchie bars aren't gluten free (not many lollies are, surprisingly) so i had to use shaved chocolate as the decoration - next time i would use a combo of dark and white shaved.

Chocolate Cheesecake - gluten free version
as always please check ingredients to ensure brands are still gluten free

Ingredients
270g chocolate gluten free biscuits (or we used a mix of freedom chocolate ones and arnotts rice cookies)
55g butter
125g block milk chocolate (we used Cadbury
60g caster sugar
2 tsp vanilla bean paste or essence
750g cream cheese
5 eggs
160g sour cream
2 tbsp Dutch process cocoa mixed with a little warm water
small block of white and small block of dark chocolate
gluten free heart sprinkles

Method
Place biscuits and 40g butter into TM bowl and mill for 10 seconds on speed 7.
Press into large spring form pan and bake in 160°C oven for 10 minutes. Set aside.
In clean TM bowl chop chocolate with remaining 15g butter for 5 seconds on speed 4. Melt for 4 minutes at 37°C on speed soft.
Add sugar, essence and cream cheese and beat for 30 seconds on speed 8.
Add remaining ingredients and blend for 1 minute on speed 9.
Wrap a double layer of foil around the outside of the springform pan.
Pour cheesecake mix into spring form pan and place in a water bath in 160°C oven.
Cook for 1 hour or until set in centre.
Cool.
cover with peelings of chocolate and sprinkles sprinkled over lol



to be honest i wasn't that excited by this cheesecake, but i am not a chocolate cheesecake lover anyway! i think the honeycomb would have made it more interesting, or some baileys or other liqueur and / or berries would have made it more interesting.

it was not my day for cooking though, as i burnt the crust a little by having to go to the shop after putting it in the oven (mind you, the trip meant having to put the kids in our little car, without them all being properly restrained like they are in the big car, but g had taken that to put petrol in - usually we never need to go out when we're home alone with the kids on a weekend!!) i had only bought 250g of cream cheese and needed 3 times that!

i have made cheesecake 2-3 times in my life and have to admit i am no cheesecake chef :(

the Barbie cake report (but shhh don't tell my kids yet!)

it could have been a raging success but instead it was a bit of a disaster :( i know emelia and the other kids won't know so that's good but *I* know!

first i checked the height of the stacked cakes against barbie and then evened them off. Hot jam to stick them together and a hole in the middle with barbie wrapped in baking paper and voila, she is wearing a huge cake lol

i then rolled out the marzipan layer. i had gone to the 2 biggest supermarkets in belconnen and couldn't buy the orchard icing i usually use, or the orchard marzipan. the only marzipan i could get was about half the size of usual, so the layer i ended up with was paper thin and not going to achieve anything in smoothing out the lumps and bumps in teh cake!

after googling "fondant" icing and not having gelatine, i found an 'easy fondant icing' recipe based on condensed milk - BIG mistake!

it was sooo wet so i kept adding more icing sugar, and then when i went to roll it out and pick it up i discovered it just fell to pieces. it was soooo soft.

by that time it was after 10pm so i had to go with it. i put it on the cake but i couldn't even get it to cover the cake and stay on :( i tried to decorate it with pretty little hearts and silver cachous but no luck.

so off to the sewing machine to make a skirt (thank goodness i'd bought this fabric to make a skirt for rory to wear to dancing, which we never ended up doing!) quickly to cover up the mistakes!

all would have been well except g's aunt laughing at it - humph!

as it turned out the butter cake was divine (remember iwas complaining it wasn't a good recipe? i think i needed to leave it for a day or two before eating) and i hadn't mixed the mud cake well enough.

and as i thought the kids didn't notice a thing!!

and today's child-friendly cooking effort...

decorating arrowroot biccies lol

high tech stuff!

ingredients:
arrowroot biccies (we use aldi brand ;))
icing sugar, maybe 2-3 cups
tiny amount butter (like 1/2 tspn)
small amount boilling water
pink or red food colouring - one drop
anything to make the faces - we used the leftover writing gel and purple, blue and green sprinkles

get teh kids to sift the icing sugar into a small bowl. i covered the bench with the tupperware pastry sheet in a failed attempt not to make too much mess lol

put your tiny bit of butter in and add enough hot water, a bit at a time, to mix it into a thick yet spreadable consistency. don't stress if you need to add more icing sugar (i always do!) add the food colouring to make 'skin' colour and mix well

spread the icing thickly on the biccies (yes this is guaranteed sugar high waiting to happen)

show the kids how to make the faces or do it for those too little to make their own (in our house 2 was too little and 3.5 and just turned 5 is big enough ;))

use the sprinkles as hair

let set for minimum 1/2 hour but if possible more like 2-3 hours before serving

great cheap and fun party food - i think we're going to do these for emelia's birthday party in september. you could even have guests make their own at the start of a party.

foodly update

yes i know foodly is not a real word lol i have been too flat out this week to blog at all...

so let me see - on thursday geoff stayed home with rory (who has a chest infection) and i asked him to make this soup - i was really in the mood for checkpeas for some reason! while it was nice it was not quite what i was after - i think another tin or two of chickpeas and it might have been right. as it was it seemed really quite similar to this soup of mine. (though maybe my memory of the second is faulty, the recipes seem quite different lol)

last night of course was the maccas birthday dinner (gosh their burgers are pathetic, i have only eaten the deli choices rolls for the past years and the chicken burger i had was so tiny and shockingly bad!)

tonight i am going to make Dani's Javanese Beef Curry in the slow cooker. i'll still do the beans one night but probably slot it into the end of the week's plans.

yesterday of course involved making birthday cakes (yes, multiple). first thing in the morning i realised i hadn't made anything for ryan to take to preschool (i had also forgotten it was his birthday til mum reminded me but that's another story lol). so i whipped up a batch of carrot cup cakes (last time we did a big aldi shop i stocked up on cooking butter but g froze it all - aaagh! so i went for the butter free carrot cakes). they were literally straight out of the oven into a container to preschool so no frosting lol

then in the afternoon i made his birthday cake which was pretty much a disaster...
if you have a look at the picture here, the story is underneath


plus... i remembered this mroning that i had planned to put blue and green sparkly sprinkles all over it too and totally forgot - but i guess that's what happens when you have less than an hour to decorate a cake from scratch as well as getting 3 children and yourself dressed, picking up your mother (who thankfully helped with the dressing children part) and drive to the maccas of choice!

PS: thank goodness it wasn't a party, just 2 of his friends for dinner (their families also tagged along ;)b)

i also have some soups to make this weekend after my choku bai jo shop on thursday - i bought a 6kg pumpkin to cook up (i'm hoping for a recipe where i can roast the pumpkin mostly whole to save the effort of cutting it up LOL and parsnips which i'm thinking i might use in this recipe, it sounds delish!

EASY Mud Cake

Melt:
250g dark chocolate *
250g unsalted butter
3/4 cup sugar
1 1/2 cups boiling water

Add:
1 1/2 cups SR flour, sifted
1/4 cup cocoa, sifted
2 eggs
1 tablespoon grog (brandy, tia maria, whatever)

mix **

bake at 180' for 30-40 minutes

* the lady who gave me the recipe says she always uses real chocolate, not cooking chocolate.
i used white chocolate brown sugar and butterscotch schnapps for a white / caramel mud cake.

this is the recipe i use to make our birthday cakes for decorating. i make it in a large round tin (maybe about 30cm across). I'll put some pics in of some of the cakes i've made for the kids' parties :D because it's so rich it goes for a lot of people.