The (almost disasterous) birthday cake

The big girl turned eight on Friday. It was a weekend of celebrations, with my Nan turing 90 the next day. Naturally the celebtrations kicked off on Friday with a birthday cake. We have a tradition in our family of the kids choosing their own cakes. This occasionally backfires (thinking of the year when I had to make a stable complete with icing modeled horse heads coming out of the stable doors!) This year, the big girl chose this. I didn;t get off to a great start, discovering at 10.30 that I only had two eggs when I needed four. I had a client due to drop some paperwork off at 11 so there was no chance I could get to the shop and back before then with a small child in tow. After trying to ring my vegan sister in law who could surely help with egg substitutes if only she had answered the phone I turned to Google.

Having rejected a few suggestions I read that you could replace each egg with 150 ml milk. I am still not sure if that is accurate but I went ahead with two eggs and 300ml of milk.

The cakes cooked well, and looked great when they were stacked. Now it was time for icing the cake. Unfortunately I didn't have quite as much butter as I needed so the icing was bit thin in places. There were one or two close calls when an over eager helper lent to far and almost toppled on to the cake but we got there in the end.

And the look of delight on her face when we cut into the cake and the rainbow was revealed was priceless.

You couldn't even really tell there weren't enough eggs. (And my client was an hour late, so I could have bought those eggs anyway).

And that birthday quilt I was working on.... The top is finished but that is as far as I got. Maybe for Christmas.