Lots of Birthdays!

This is a particular time of year is just full of birthdays. Dave's brother and sister are both in December, its my birthday in January and then my sister, Dave and Dave's dad are all in February as well as our anniversary!

When I asked my sister what she wanted for her birthday she said she wanted a tortoise with a balloon attached to it and a Dachshund dressed like a hotdog. So that's what she got.

I made her a Brownie and Marshmallow pie (recipe adapted from one I saw on Sally's Baking Addiction) and made a marzipan tortoise for the top. The pie was really nice, but very sweet so we had very small pieces. Also as we served it hot the candles kept falling over!

And then I crocheted this guy, 

This is Lord Buttons the Dachshund in his removable hotdog costume, the pattern for the dog came from VooDoo Maggie's Adorable Amigurumi book but the costume was something I made up and will be putting up a blog on how I did it in the next week or so.

Tomorrow it is my lovely friend Katie's 21st birthday and she is flying off to Amsterdam,  Monday was her last day in work before her birthday and I promised her that I would make a giant cake so she could share it with as many people in the office as possible. Not everyone got a slice (there's 100 or so people just in our office) but I did my best:

It was dubbed the "Matilda" cake as it looks like the one that Bruce Bogtrotter ate. Just to give you an idea of how big it was, the plate that its sat on is a large dinner plate and the box is about 4 inches tall. It was 4 chocolate fudge cakes with whipped cream in the middle and then the whole thing was covered in dark chocolate ganache.

I also crocheted her this as a Congratulations on her new job in our department

(Pattern from Little Muggles in the Zoomigurumi book)

She named him Charlie after me :)

Hope everyone is recovering from January (gloomiest part of the year) and is looking forward to the rest of 2015 xx

Marscapone Frosting

I had my good friend from university Liza come to stay this weekend. I spent the majority of the week before she got here hooked up to IVs at the hospital; turns out my body can't cope fighting 2 infections at once! As I still wasn't feeling 100% we didn't do much, Sunday was spent sitting under a duvet watching Disney films, I had to limit my sing-along-ing as my throat was really painful. I did however keep my promise to bake her something. Of all the things I have in my baking repertoire her and Dave will always request the same thing - Brownies.

I made Dave some last week, just plain brownies that when microwaved were molten in the middle (Dave thinks they're the best ones I have ever made!) and wanted to do something slightly different. I found a recipe for brownies,baked as individual cakes rather than a traybake and with marscapone frosting on top.

I've only had marscapone frosting once, it was in a Lemon cake someone else made, and it was amazing but wasn't something that I had made myself. It's made pretty much the same as you would make cream cheese frosting for carrot cake; its just the cheese, icing sugar and vanilla essence. I also added in some chocolate shavings.

These are really good if like me you have a sweet tooth. They are very sweet, and I couldn't eat more than one (a day). The marscapone frosting is sweeter than usual cream cheese, I'm actually tempted to put it on my carrot cake next time I make it, see what the difference is.

Has anyone else been baking this weekend? xx