Cake Crisis Averted

It was Flo’s first birthday last week and we had an amazing time with the smiley girl who really loved all the attention and presents; she’s just like her mother.

I decided to make her a cake in the shape of a big number 1 which didn’t go exactly to plan. The recipe/ construction idea came from an old Children’s party cake book my Mum has had since the 80’s from Australian Women’s Weekly. I have no idea why she has an Australian cake book but it seems that a few other people know of this book’s amazing novelty cakes so it must have been very popular at the time. When I was growing up this was the holy grail of cake books and each year I would help my Mum pick one out for my birthday and watch as she made the sugary magic happen. So I was very excited to be able to borrow the book for Flo’s very first birthday cake.

The book suggests you use two loaf tins measuring 10x3inches. My loaf tins were no where near this long and thin, so I made the crazy decision of using a roasting tin to make a huge sponge that I would then cut up to make the various shapes needed for the number 1 cake. Oh, how wrong I was. Not only was there not enough cake mix to make a suitably tall enough cake but the shaped base of the roasting tin meant that the mixture stuck and so when I turned it out this happened:

Thankfully I made this fatal cake error the night before Flo’s party and so has time to quickly ran out and buy some loaf tins and ingredients to re-bake the cake. I had to make do with the normal size of loaf tin and do a bit of a dodgy cutting job to get it to look like a number 1 but once covered in icing and loads of Smarties it turned out to look really good. Phew!

Cake crisis aside this past year has been a real whirlwind for our little family. Flo’s arrival into the world was not what we had hoped when we thought of the birth of our first baby. There were no balloons, presents, congratulations or happy tears and so I’m so glad that her first birthday was all of those things that we missed and more. Our friends and family were finally all able to get together over our little girl and welcome her into the world properly and for this I am so grateful. Happy Birthday Florence and here’s to many more.