Birthday Baking...

Hey Everyone...

How are you all? How is your Monday morning? I found it REALLY hard to get out of bed today, despite the beautiful blue sky! I think a week of birthday celebrations has really taken it's toll! Not that I am complaining!

I have lots to show you over the next few days, including more birthday presents, my party, and a very special outing on my actual birthday! But I thought I would start simple with the cakes and goodies I baked for my birthday this year!

As you all probably know, I LOVE baking, and so my birthday is a perfect excuse to bake lots, and not end up eating them all myself.

It also gave me a chance to try some new recipes! The first thing I made was some Banofee Whoopie Pies from The Hummingbird Bakery Cake Days book! I love Banofee and whoopie pies so this was a perfect recipe! I took them in for my new work colleagues to try...

 

The only downside to these was that because the mixture was very loose, they kind of expanded and became very large and flat. But they tasted lovely! I also treated my colleagues to some cupcakes.

These raspberry trifle cupcakes were also from The Hummingbird Bakery Cake Days book...

They were filled with fresh raspberries, raspberry jam and some of the custard topping. I got to use the fantastic 'cupcake corer' gadget that the lovely Sophie sent me as part of my swap package! It was the first time I had ever made custard and it came out really well, only a tiny bit lumpy! Unfortunately I messed up and forgot to put these in the fridge and so after a day or so the raspberries on top had gone mouldy! My use of fresh fruit is limited and I should have realised, so half of them ended up thrown away!

Then on Friday night I started my baking marathon for my birthday party on Saturday. I used another Hummingbird Bakery recipe to make these Banoffee cupcakes! They really were a mixture of the previous two recipes as the cupcakes used the same batter as the whoopie pies and the topping was the same custard from the trifle cupcakes, just with caramel added. These tasted lovely...

But the piece de resistance was a recipe that I changed to make it 'kid party' friendly. I whipped up four victoria sponge cake layers, added lots of food colouring and some yummy cream cheese icing from the original Hummingbird Bakery book to make this....

A RAINBOW LAYER CAKE! Now from the outside it looked like, brown, yellow, yellow, green... But once you cut into it, you got the full effect...

Everyone was really impressed, which made me feel great! It means a lot to me that I can bake nice things for my friends! And it tasted lovely which was the main thing! It's all gone!

So there we have it - a very busy week of baking, not to mention much much more which I will blog about over the next few days! Seriously I'll be sick of my birthday soon (ha fat chance!)

 Have a lovely Monday!

Love Jewel xXx