Kathryn August 13th, 2011

Joshua turns 2 tomorrow, and it’s times like this that you start asking ourself questions like ‘Where has all the time gone!?’ or ‘When did he grow up!?’ Of course asking those questions never changes the fact that the time HAS gone, and that he HAS grown up, and will continue to grow every day from now until eternity! … I’m trying to embrace it rather than fight it, but we’ll see how that goes!

To celebrate his birthday we had a family party. I wanted it to be low key, but fun, and something he would recognise as being special and different. We decided to have a ‘Cars’ theme as it is, hands down, his favourite movie. He would watch it everyday, several times a day if I let him! To decorate we put up a few balloons along with a Cars poster and pictures of the characters, which he looked over carefully before deciding that it was in fact ‘Cars’. It wasn’t anything much really, but I knew that he would recognise it and it was something new for him.

Cars poster and characters.

Then we looked at the food! We just had basic party food including popcorn, biscuits and veges with dip and fruit. I also made some foccacia bread with pizza toppings and made some racing cars. I found the idea for the racing cars here and everyone thought they were great! Super easy, but as soon as Josh saw them he knew they were cars and of course, knew they were yummy!

Milky Way Racing Cars!

Earlier in the week it was Papi’s birthday and of course then, the presents were for someone else! So before the party started today he was giving the present to other people! Of course, when it came time to open presents it didn’t take long for Joshy to realise that they were for him, and that he liked opening them! He was spoilt with his presents, and he loves them. He has really started to outgrow a lot of his toys so it’s nice for him to have some more age appropriate toys, as well as the other presents he got which weren’t toys. We have a couple more presents to give him tomorrow as it will be actual birthday but he did very well for himself today!

Why is this card making noises!?

Opening presents on Mummy’s lap.

Joshua playing with his Mack truck

After the presents we had the cake! Joshua blew out the candles perfectly, even if it was at the beginning of the Happy birthday song! I decided to make a Lightning McQueen cake and although I was really nervous about it, I was really pleased with the end result. I’d never made a cake like this before and so it took a little while to do but as we went along we learnt a few things that will make it easier next time! It also helped that before I even started I had great advice from the ladies at the cake shop as well as the more experienced cake decorators in our family! Not to mention a very observant and helpful husband who assisted in the decorating as well.

Lightning McQueen birthday cake!

Joshua had such a wonderful time! He told us several times this afternoon that he was ‘happy’ and it was clear that he was really enjoying himself! With half of our extended family living interstate it was a relatively small gathering, which was kind of nice. Of course we missed all of our other family and wish they could have been here but the small numbers meant I could focus more on Joshua during the party and that it wasn’t too overwhelming and noisy for him! We spent the remainder of the evening playing with his new toys and despite being over half an hour past his bed time, he was very disappointed when he had to go to bed!

Eating dinner while playing with his new toys!

His birthday tomorrow will be a much quieter day, but we hope to enjoy spending some quality time with him. Part of the day will undoubtedly involve me spending some time wondering how I was blessed with such a precious gift. The unconditional love that exists between parents and their children is amazing. It’s also hard to comprehend how a small child can contain so much! He’s gentle, loving, energetic, inquisitive, playful, happy and determined…. and that’s just before he gets us out of bed in the morning! We love you Joshy!

Our precious Gem.

• Children , Family , Food
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Kathryn May 4th, 2011

Thanks to Cooking.com for featuring our photo of this in a photo gallery in May 2012.

So it was Dallin’s birthday this week. He’s not a man for ‘hoo haa’ – he didn’t want a special dinner, he didn’t want friends over, he didn’t want to have take away – so we went about our day as usual, he got home and we had chicken rolls for dinner because that’s what was on the menu plan (yeah, I know… exciting right!?) and then he looked after the boy while I taught a half hour lesson. Very understated!
There was only 1 request Dallin had for his birthday. When I asked him what type of cake he wanted he said ‘Cake!? No…. or, maybe a 7 layer jelly cake’ (Jello-o for any Americans reading this) – Well, when it’s the only request he has what else am I meant to do but research, and make a jelly cake!?

The Rainbow Jelly cake

Now, I know that I would never make a hand model, but my hands aside the picture looks pretty good, and I’ll admit that the cake looked pretty good too! So Dallin took this photo and posted it on his Flickr account and has had atleast 1 or 2 people ask how I made it!? Although it took me 2 days to make, it’s really quite easy.

You need as many packets of Jelly as you want layers, sweetened condensed milk… again this will depend on how many layers you want. You also need Gelatin, lemon juice and a whole lot of boiled water. For this one I used 4 different jellys and 2 cans of sweetened condensed milk.

Milk Layer
3/4 cup boiled water
2 dessert spoons of Gelatin
juice of 1 lemon (I used bottled of lemon juice and just guessed how much)
1 can sweetened condensed milk

Jelly Layer
1 pack of jelly
1 1/2 cups boiled water.
Dissolve jelly in boiling water and allow to sit (in the bench) for a minimum 30 mins until mixture is warm to cool, but still liquid. I left one for atleast a couple of hours and it was fine.

I started with a milk layer and poured about half of the mixture into a 9″ cake tin. Once it was set I poured the jelly layer on top – repeat until complete, making sure each layer is set before pouring on the next one! Because the milk mixture is much more than you need for 1 layer you can either adjust the quantities to only make as much as you need at 1 time OR you can leave the milk sitting in HOT water until you need it again, so that it stays liquid OR (and I haven’t tried this) I heard that it doesn’t take very long to ‘melt’ in the microwave if it’s set.

The 4 jelly, 4 milk layers, completely filled my 9 inch spring form cake tin, to the very top – so you may want to take that into account when planning how many layers! I had thought about decorating the top with a small amount of cream (just a border)- but I ran out of time, and Dallin likes jelly – just jelly – cream or ice cream or any other garnishing or decoration is not required! Having said that, I did have left overs tonight with cream and some crumbled chocolate and I thought it was great!

Now, having done this once I have just a few things I would do differently.

*On a side note, my husband lived in Switzerland and Germany for 2 years and he tells me that the word for jelly in German means ‘Food of the Gods’*

First, I would endeavour to make the milk layer as thin as possible. Mine got thinner as I went along but I would have like them even thinner….

Second, I used a spring form pan and lined it with glad wrap….That was painful…. I’m sure some bakers out there would be horrified to know that I only own either spring form or silicone bakeware. Next time I would use either a silicone or a standard cake tin. This would be in the hopes that I could invert the silicone dish and it would come straight out or, I could put the cake tin in boiling water for a minute before inverting it straight on to a dish.

Third, I would have started a day earlier so that I wasn’t pouring the last layer of jelly on at 4.30pm the night of his birthday…..

Fourth, When pouring the last layer on I would leave the tin in the fridge and bring the jelly to the cake instead of the other way round…. I’m sure my sticky jelly floor agrees with me

I did play with the idea of giving the cake a thin biscuit base, for 2 reasons, the first is completely selfish – I love biscuit bases – I don’t know why, but I’m pretty sure it’s genetic (well that’s my excuse). The second reason is that I thought it would just give a bit of foundation and stability to the cake. If I was doing a biscuit base then I would go back to the spring form pan, but I wouldn’t necessarily line it, just to keep the outside as smooth as possible.

If you do a google image search for jello layer cake you will see a few different ones which look infinitely better than mine but I’m pretty sure the recipes are all very similar.

But after all of that the most important things are that 1. Dallin loved it, and 2. I had fun and was pretty happy with the end result.
Make sure you let me know if any of you try it, I would love to see and hear about it

• Family , Food
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