Dad's Birthday

First of all I'm going to tell you as far as I'm aware Mother's day is certainly not on march 10th and is really next weekend (this is not my excuse for forgetting to buy anything) so this blog won't be on Mother's day at all, sorry. This weekend has been my Dad's Birthday but he was away so we celebrated it yesterday, meaning we already had a birthday cake in the house and there was no need for a Mother's day cake (one of the reasons why Mother's day is next weekend). 

So this is the monster Birthday cake! I got the recipe from 'The Great British Bake Off Showstoppers' but I won't be typing out the recipe, sorry, because it would take up a lot of time and space. 
It may just look like an ordinary cake smothered in butter icing from the badly taken photograph, and this is partly true; it is smothered in butter icing, but this is no ordinary cake. Underneath the mountains of butter icing is a almond meringue sandwiched with butter cream to a genoese orange flavoured sponged, sandwiched to another meringue, sandwiched to another layer of sponge covered in almond praline and orange flavoured butter cream and topped with more almond praline. Wow. Weight watchers and the ambulance are now on speed dial and if no other blogs are written you may presume I have died of heart disease. I have to say though, it tastes good.

On to the presents! Well Dad being the modest, practical and not really having an interest in the luxuries of life is really quite hard to buy for. We eventually decided to stick with the traditional annual T-shirt (from Boden) a hankie for each day of the week (from not on the high street, great gift site!)and Mumford and Sons older album, 'sigh no more' (mainly because I wanted it).


I don't think we did too badly this year and finally I just thought I share the Birthday card we bought him. It's not particularly Birthday related but the dog reminded me of one of our three dogs and I loved the illustration, extremely cute indeed! I hope if you decided to be Orthodox and celebrate Mother's day today you had a very happy day too.