Cake.

I love cakes.  Just love them.  I love how they look, I love eating them of course and the urge to make a big gooey cake is always there.  If I see a recipe for a pretty cake I write down all the ingredients needed and if I actually get round to buying them the next stage of making the cake rarely happens.  So I have a cupboard jam packed with cake decorations, icing (in various forms, a few boxes of icing sugar, a pack of royal icing, several tubes of writing icing - some gone hard and some just about usable), every shade of food colour, large quantities of flour... you get the picture.  I recently found THE most amazing blog whilst pinning pictures of baked goodies on Pinterest and if you love cakes you need to have a look at Sweetapolita 

 I decided to create this delight for my mums birthday last week...

 I am aware that I was clearly over estimating my cake making skills which usually consist of buying a box of ready made cake mix but the pictures were just so pretty and when I showed Daisy she convinced me that we could definitely do this.  I made my list.  I sent my man off to purchase everything needed (I didn't realise that ingredients from an American website would have a completely different name here), but with a bit of help from a couple of old ladies he discovered that vegetable shortening is margarine, confectioners sugar is icing sugar and pink gel is a bit like food colouring.  
I am not one for properly reading therefore not properly understanding instructions, I improvise a lot.  I don't have a Kitchenaid - I have a small Magimix food processor given to me by my gran when she bought herself a better one and I don't think it has a 'paddle' attachment which is what the instructions said I needed here.  Please note : this amount of ingredients will not fit into a Magimix.  I discovered this after trying to sieve in vast amounts of flour twice.  I abandoned this idea, transferred it into a big bowl and used an electric hand whisk, circa 1970, also from my gran.  It worked out OK, the whisk did sound like it was going to pass out from the strain of the sheer volume of cake batter but it got there in the end.  So the batter was done and tasting good, the next step was to put this into two cake tins, bake, then repeat as it is a four layered cake.  I weighed out the exact amount of batter, feeling very professional, into my lined, greased tins.  Alas, my tins were smaller than required which resulted in the this...

After cleaning up this mess, feeding the baby, bathing Daisy, doing some GCSE maths with Jacob and chatting to Ben about his new cool hairstyle, I baked the remainder of the batter and it did turn out well in the end.  In fact it was the yummiest cake I have ever eaten.  We covered it in pink ice cream flavour frosting and edible glitter and.... ta da....