Crumbs, It's Gone

I wanted to show you the lovely cake I made a couple of days ago. An old fashioned Caraway Seed Cake, most recipes for seed cake these days are for poppy seed, often with lemon drizzle added, but I wanted to make the type I much prefer. Daughter#1 made one of these Poppy Seed with Lemon Drizzle cakes recently but to my mind the stronger flavour of this one with caraway is much nicer.

Anyway, as I said, I wanted to show it to you but by the time I got my camera out all that was left were - well - crumbs, but it was sooo nice. Oh, and take no notice of the recipe shown in the book next to it, Daughter#1 likes to change the page to show something else pretty and yummy looking every now and again, this was just the latest page for some coconut cup cakes.

Caterpillar Birthday Cake

Would you like to see the wonderful birthday cake creation I made for Daughter#2 the other day? Actually, as usual I didn't get around to making her one, and, even worse, didn't manage to buy one in secret for her. Usually I choose something lovely and tailored to her likes but this time I didn't and don't even have the excuse of being too busy. However, it was not a problem as she went out with The Chauffeur and chose one herself. A supermarket chocolate caterpillar one which really is intended for young children. She was happy enough with it to post it up on facebook saying that 'actually she liked it', the comment and photo was in turn 'liked' by many of her friends.

In an attempt to jolly it up a little we popped it my brand new cake stand added a few edible flowers around it and stuck in some tall thin candles which were of the fizzing variety.

The ubiquitous blowing out photo. This needed lots of blowing as the candles are not only fizzing but re-starter types. It didn't taste too bad, surprisingly. Unfortunately The Chauffeur liked it a little too well and finished off the last slice a couple of days later before Daughter#2 got to it.

School Bags

                                                                                    

School starts back tomorrow and so the last few days have been a time for uniform shopping, shoes, skirts and bags. Who would have thought it would be so hard to get the RIGHT bag. It has to be so big but not too big, the right style, the right colour etc. The last one daughter#2 had was like the one in the picture except it was red. As the zip broke at the end of last term we've been looking for the perfect replacement. We finally found one after much traipsing of shops, the new one is almost exactly the same as the last one after all that but this time from a different shop. I'm glad it wasn't Superdry, which seems to be the IN shop for teens at the moment, as you end up paying for the name - or in other words 'too much' especially when the zip breaks before it's time is out in my estimation.

                                                     

At least we got in a bit of coffee drinking and cake eating while shopping, one of my favourite pastimes. We shared a delicious Giotto in Patisserie Valerie, which is similar to their Tiramisu shown here. I guess that made up for my tired feet.