Birthdays Galore

I'm not sure about you, but have you noticed that there's usually one time each year where there seems to be an overload of birthdays? December/January is definitely like this for me - both friends and family members celebrate their birthdays during this time - including me! My birthday is on the 19th (in case you were wondering ;) ) and somehow I managed to spread it out over a few days, what with me being disorganised and everyone not being available on the same day. On the night my sister and her family and my parents got pizza and my Mum made one of my favourite desserts - a beautiful lemon meringue pie.

This is a picture of me and my beautiful nephew Archie (his birthday was in December) and I love it. He was very excited about helping me blow out my candle!

And the beautiful bunch of flowers I got from a lady I work with. I also got another bunch which Archie chose, but unfortunately I forgot to take a picture before they wilted. :( They were very pretty though, and I was touched that he'd picked them out!
And what is a birthday without a funny tale to tell! I just know my mum is going to kill me for posting this picture but I just can't help myself. A few days before my birthday I found a beautiful cake that I asked my mum to make for me. The plan was to take it to the picnic all of my family and I were having, and the night before mum had the cake made and it looked very pretty - but the day of the picnic turned out to be very hot and so when we went to open the container to eat the cake this is what we found -

It still tasted delicious - but as one of my sister's joked this was probably 'what Martha wouldn't do'

As I mentioned in my last post, it was my gorgeous nephew Lenny's 1st birthday on Australia Day (January 26) and so of course his mum and I had plenty of baking to do! B was in charge of the most important thing of course - the birthday cake and (as the theme was of course Australia and Australian animals) she decided to make an echidna cake which, as you can see, turned out really well. How cute is it?!

I was in charge of the cupcakes and I made my usual red velvet cupcakes but attempted to make them look like koalas and echidnas. I couldn't find all the bits and pieces that I'd hoped to use to decorate the cupcakes with, but I think they turned out looking pretty cute.

The Koalas. I used cream cheese icing for the background, raspberry bullets for the noses, more cream cheese icing as well as mini choc chips for the eyes and mini pink marshmallows for the ears.

The Echidnas - Chocolate icing for the background, raspberry bullets for the nose, cream cheese icing and choc chips for the eyes and licorice for the spines.

This is the Australia shaped caramel lamington that I made. I had intended to make mini ones using a cookie cutter I found, but they weren't working out. I ended up printing off an A4 map of Australia and using it as a template to cut the cake out with. It's not quite the right shape - and of course Tasmania is way too big. But it looked very effective in real life - btw the Australian flag has been placed where we live.

I also had to share this with you! A friend of mine invited me out to a bar for her birthday this Friday just past. The bar was called The Croft Institute and had a medical theme with lots of medical tools and gadgets everywhere (there was even a hospital bed in the female toilets apparently). I ended up choosing to have a cocktail called Elixir which was served up in a glass and with a syringe acting as the straw! It was a novel way to serve a drink, and fit in very well with the medical theme of the bar.