an ombre cake for Lizzy's 15th birthday

A girl about to turn 15. A grandma keen to help out. Put them together. What do you get?

Ombre cake!

There are two words I never thought I'd see in one sentence. I didn't know such a thing existed until a few weeks ago. In fact, I'd never heard of the word "ombre" until my much-more-fashionable-than-me girl brought the word to my attention in relation to hair styles.

Doesn't it look glorious?

Each layer is a different flavour: vanilla, caramel, choc-caramel, chocolate. They're sandwiched together with caramel, and topped with chocolate cream icing.

My mum used the recipe here and substituted dark brown sugar for brown sugar in the caramel layer, which tasted just like sticky date pudding. That layer alone will inspire a caramel cake soon, it was so yummy.

And here's my girl, 15 years old!! I can hardly believe it. Seems like only yesterday that a plump baby with dark hair and midnight-blue eyes was lying in my arms for the first time.

We sit on the couch together every morning, read our Bibles, and pray. We cook together and talk about life and occasionally *cough* even argue. We're the only two girls in a house full of boys, and we're good mates, and did I mention we're going away for a mother-daughter weekend soon?

So glad God answered my prayers for a daughter - Please? Just one?? - all those years ago.

a lamington train cake for Andy's 7th birthday

I'm sure you know this one. The easiest cake of all time. I think this is the third time I've made one. Ben asked for this cake for his third and fourth birthdays! Now it's Andy's turn.

So easy to make.

We stuck the wheels on with icing, and used fruit sticks to hold the carriages together.

How to blow out candles when you're recovering from the flu so you don't give it to everyone else: don't blow all over the cake. One piece will do!

Happy 7th birthday, Andy!

a circus cake for Andy's 6th birthday

My youngest son Andy turned six this year (hard to believe!). He wanted a circus cake. So out came our trusty Women's Weekly birthday cake book, and we made ourselves a big top.

Here's how we did it. We started with two gluten free cakes (made from a cake mix) and lots of stripy sour straps.

We hollowed out the top of one cake (in the recipe you hollow it out all the way down, but we just did the top bit - you'll see why later) and used the cake scraps to make the "point" on the other cake.

We made a triple batch of blue butter icing,

and spread it over the two cakes.

We filled the hollow with lollies (now you know why I didn't hollow out the cake all the way down, even though the kids wanted me to: "Go deeper, go deeper, Mummy!").

We used sour straps to make the stripes on our big top (toothpicks helped secure the stubborn bits),

then put the pointy cake on the other one. We used a couple of Nerds Ropes (I can't believe there's a Wikipedia entry on that!) to cover the join between the two cakes.

The final touches were some "happy birthday" candles and balloons, and a Duplo ringmaster and animals.

"Happy birthday, dear Andy, happy birthday to you!"

The best bit was the kids' faces when I lifted off the top and they saw the lollies underneath... Surprise!

another volcano cake that almost worked

For some reason, it's been a year for volcano cakes in our house. Here's another volcano cake we made that almost worked - and it would have worked perfectly if I read the recipe more carefully! :) It was very easy, and the yummiest birthday cake we've ever made, by a lo-o-o-ong way. This one was for Ben's 11th birthday, and Lizzy helped me make it.

You start with a round chocolate cake (ours is a double gluten free cake from a packet)and 4 litres of ice cream softened a little (about 10 minutes) then shoved into a metal mould - this shape is great if you can get it. Put it in the freezer overnight.Turn the ice cream out on top of the cake (our ice cream is butterscotch mixed with good quality vanilla).Beat 600 ml cream with 1/4 cup cocoa and 2 tbsn icing sugar until it's thick, and spread it over the cake.Chop up lots of chocolate bars (the yummiest is Snickers, but include some Cherry Ripe, Crunchies, Toblerone and anything else you like). This is where we went wrong. I misread the recipe and bought about 400g of mixed chocolate bars instead of (believe it or not) 200g chocolate bars and 1 1/2 kg Rocky Road.Here's our volcano - as you can see, there weren't quite enough chocolate bars to cover it! But it looks good all the same. (You're supposed to pour thick strawberry topping over it, do some complicated thing with sheets of homemade toffee, and put dinosaurs and dessicated coconut mixed with green food colouring around the edge. I got a little lazy here! ;) )Put it back in the freezer to harden up for a few hours (the cream is YUMMY after you've done this). Get it out, stick some sparklers in, light them,
wait for them to go out,then watch it disappear.YUM!

This cake is adapted from the "Volcano Vibes" cake in The Australian Women's Weekly Children's Birthday Cake Book.

an easy volcano cake that almost worked...

This volcano cake was one of the easiest we've made, and almost one of the most effective...;) Okay, so it looks kinds of pudding-ish. But Thomas and Andy, whose birthday it was, didn't mind!!It's super-easy. Here's how we did it:

We baked a butter cake in a pudding basin,
made some chocolate butter icing,and iced the cake.We made runny red icing,runny orange icing,and runny yellow icing;then poured them on the cake - first red,then orange and yellow.We put some dinosaurs around the sidesand stuck in some sparklers.Voila! One volcano cake!

Lizzy's 12th birthday

I spent the night before Lizzy's 12th birthday party praying it wouldn't rain. Every morning for a week Lizzy had checked the forecast: cold and wet. On the day of the party I woke to the sound of rain, and we watched the clouds come and go all morning.

We were going rock-climbing! Well, we were if it didn't rain. We arrived at the Latrobe University Sports Centre under cloudy skies - tightened the complicated straps on our rock-climbing harnesses - looked out the glass doors - and, with perfect timing, the rain began.

We started to remove our harnesses, then took a vote and decided to wait 5 minutes to see if the rain would stop. It did. We got in half-an-hour's glorious rock climbing and then, sure enough, the heavens opened. No matter! Cake time; pool time; and 10 tired children made their way home, one to open presents and the rest to suck lollipops.

Here are some photos. (The cake, by the way, was very easy to make: a cardboard tube pushed into the middle of a high round cake; some icing, lollies and long-stemmed lollipops; and there you go!)







Happy 12th birthday Lizzy!

a spooky castle cake for Ben's 10th birthday

Here's the castle cake we made for Ben's 10th birthday.


It's supposed to be dark purply-blue with yellow windows, but ours is teal blue with white windows. Oh well, you can't have everything! Still, it looked pretty spooky. Here's how we did it.

We sticky-taped glad bake into a cone-shaped piping bag, filled it with melted chocolate, and made chocolate spiders.


Lizzy's looked good, but mine looked more like defective scorpions!


We piped white chocolate into shapes we'd drawn on glad bake for the castle windows (7 2x3 cm and 5 3x5.5 cm windows).


The windows were supposed to be yellow, but we discovered too late that you can't colour white chocolate with water-based food colouring (duh!), you need oil-based or powdered food-colouring.


We baked three round gluten free cakes


cut one of them into a smaller circle, cut a small jam roll in half, and arranged them like this with a wooden bamboo stick holding them all together.


We made lots of teal-coloured butter icing (to stop the icing curdling, leave the milk out of the recipe, add the food-colouring, and only then add any milk needed to get the desired consistency). If we'd had powdered or oil-based colouring, I suspect it would have been easier to get a vivid, deep purply blue, but we had to make do with teal.


Of course, the best bit about making icing is licking the beaters.


Here's the cake, iced and decorated with chocolate shapes, mint sticks, Toblerone triangles, cotton-wool spider webs and a cardboard cone (sorry, I seem to have lost some photos of the decorating process, but it wasn't too tricky).


The cake looked pretty spectacular with candles in the dark.


Smoking, and spookier than ever!



This cake was adapted from Australian Women's Weekly Kid's Birthday Cakes.