Birthday at the Farm

Our wee boy is three! As usual with parenting moments like this, it feels like ages and yet no time at all since he was in an incubator in Royal Glamorgan Hospital having surprised us all by arriving 2 months before his due date. It's fair to say he hasn't stopped since, with the fading remains of a black eye appearing in all his birthday pictures as evidence of how he throws himself full tilt at the world (the injury occurred during nap time for goodness' sake!). This year he had a party at his Granny and Grandpa's farm, with a tractor and lambs in the field next door, a straw bale fort to play in and just the right amount of sunshine for a lovely day. Despite a nasty bout of tonsillitis during the previous week I somehow managed to pull off the 'Combine Harvester' cake I'd been planning so I felt I did my bit, but it was a host of wonderful family and friends who really made his day.

Ugly cake

Awww! It's a cake only a mother could love really isn't it? We had an unopened tub of sour cream left over from something or other and I remembered that various cake recipes used it. This one is a cinnamon swirl, where you split the plain mixture in two and then add cinnamon and cocoa to one and swirl them together in the tin. The tin was where I went wrong, as I used a silicone loaf 'tin' which, it turns out, is just too flexible. As the cake cooked it swelled outwards producing this rather unnattractive shape. It also caught a little on the top when P decided to do his 'turn the oven up to full when Mummy's not looking' routine. Even with a generous shawl of icing it's not pretty- but it tastes great, and that's the main thing (or is that like saying 'good personality'?!). I definitely don't blame the recipe, which came from this booklet which I rediscovered recently, having saved it from a couple of years ago. Don't know why I haven't used it before- the recipes look wonderful, including one for honey and multigrain bread that may be tomorrow's bake. I'll probably use a metal loaf tin this time, though...