I believe it may be be hereditary, skipping a generation. Let me explain…

My dad once made himself a cake sub with the leftover Domo-kun cake I made. He doesn’t like sweet things much but was hungry, so he stuffed cake inside a bit of French bread and voilà – a cake sub.

After the cake sub, he invented the trifle sandwich: Vogels bread with trifle from the previous night’s dessert. Seriously, that man should just admit he likes cake.

My dad also decided he needed more fibre with his meal, and could only bother with making toast with peanut butter. So he had his peanut butter toast with a side of mesculin.

Look what I made

And now it appears that Abby has SSS. The other day I made her pikelets (small pancakes), and she loved them. But that was not enough – she needed a sandwich…

Is it a pancake? Is it a sandwich? No, it's a pandwich!

So she decided to make one with a pancake. And what would one put inside a pancake sandwich? Rice cracker snacks of course.

Step 1: Put crackers on pancake

Step 2: Fold pancake in half over rice crackers

Step 3: Devour pandwich

Let’s hope this is a positive sign of an imaginative chef in the making. That, or she’ll just make weird sandwiches and call it cooking! (As foodie parents, I hope it’s not the latter, but if so, we will try not to judge – until we try it that is.)

I thought Cameron had a lot of hair but after comparing him with Abby at four months old he doesn’t look like he has enough!

We have hairy babies

You can do wonders with just puff pastry, caramel (premade stuff in a jar or can) and bananas – well, you can do one wonderful thing: Banoffee Tart.

Looking good already

Cut, slice, spread, assemble and bake at something like 210° C for 20 minutes… I can’t remember but they should be puffy and crisp, and delicious. A sprinkling of cinnamon and/or chocolate before baking makes it look and taste a little fancy.

Busy-mum banoffee tarts

Here you kiddies – now mummy needs a drink.

I was asked to make a simple elegant cake, with a bunch of flowers on top. Sounded like fun – I was looking for an excuse to practice making sugar flowers so was quite excited.

Sugar hydrangea in the making

The cake was three tiers: the bottom was a 12 inch chocolate cake, and the 10 inch and 8 inch tiers were a very delicious fruit cake speckled with dark chocolate bits.

Assembled hydrangea and rose

First drama: Burnt fruit cakes

The last time I made fruit cake was for my own wedding. From that I learnt that the ‘classic bake’ function on our previous oven is a very handy thing. It means that only the bottom element is turned on and when baking for 3 hours it helps prevent the tops from burning. Our new oven doesn’t have this function so alas the tops needed a bit of ‘levelling’. Tasted fine in the end though.

Sugar bouquet version 1

Second drama: Broken bouquet

After hours of labourious intricacies, the hubby accidentally knocked over my completed sugar bouquet, smashing half of the flowers. Luckily I had enough time, and experience by then, to whip up the replacements without too much bother. Luckily for him he was helping me roll fondant and it was indeed an accident. (My husband tells me that I have to mention that “In hindsight I should’ve put them in a better place and not teetering on the edge of the bench”. Who’s writing this post huh!? :D )

Third drama: Squished cake

Well bad things seem to come in threes. During transportation to the venue, a friend’s hands moulded into the sides of the top tier while he held it in the car. We got there and the round cake looked more like an hour glass. NooOoooOO – why now!?! Not now!!! I kept my cool, which is surprising for a pregnant lady, and luckily (yes, luck was the saving grace for this cake) the icing was thick and soft enough to mould back into shape. It wasn’t perfect but it at least it was round (mostly) again!

The finished cake, repaired and displaying the second version bouquet

Plenty of lessons learnt from my first commissioned cake and it was worth it all in the end to see how happy the bride was.

You can view the gallery of my cakes on the Cakes page.

A sweet and simple cake

Rolling it can be a little tricky – sometimes I get a great roll, sometimes it cracks and flattens, but it still tastes great!

Oh, and a word of warning – don’t leave it on the coffee table where your dog can reach it. I came back to one once that had the cream from one end licked clean out of the roll as far as Fez could reach!

Chocolate Sponge Roll

Makes 1

Being a good Asian wifey

With my leftover homemade Chinese roast pork (with delicious crackling that I made the last time I was feeling particularly Asian), I made a stewed pork and egg dish that I don’t really know what to call. It’s something mum always makes and I love it, so I’ll do it now and again (sometimes with chicken instead). It’s pretty much a base of water, dark soy, light soy, sugar, salt and pepper that you stew pork or chicken and boiled eggs in until they soak up the salty sweet yumminess.

Then I cooked up a simple choy sum side with oyster sauce and garlic, and served up the rest of the roast pork as is.

All I needed was a clear soup for finishing the meal, but I think three dishes was enough work!

I rewarded myself with some non-alcoholic beer, courtesy of my thoughtful husband :)

The original plan was to make gingerbread ones because I know the gingerbread recipe I have is delicious. However, we experienced a bit of humidity ourselves here in Wellington and my trial cookies turned into cake. They became so soft that they fell apart if you tried to pick them up! So we went for a simple sugar cookie by Alton Brown which proved hardier and still yummy.

100-something cookies

After several test runs of different icing colours and patterns, the final product was a heart flooded with light pink icing, and piped with blue and dark pink criss crossing. I have to say the hardest thing about all this was the piping. I almost gave myself carpal tunnel syndrome again from the hours of piping to achieve the stripes – my hands ached and started tingling that night.

The iced wedding cookies - not bad for a novice

But it was worth it. They looked really nice on the tables and tasted pretty good too.

The table layout

He must’ve had an epiphany or something, and said “Ooh! I know what we could have – you know that furry monster thing on the motivational poster about God killing kittens whenever someone masturbates?” – ok, maybe not an epiphany but he decided that’s what he wanted (because of the Internet meme association, not because of the fate of kittens). We’re talking about Domo-kun (we weren’t geeky enough and had to Google for that).

The Domo cake

He also wanted a red velvet cake and ended up baking the cake himself (yay) and I decorated. Things worked out really well because the cross section of the cake looked as if we had given Domo an autopsy.

Mmmm meaty

And the cake was delicious. I hadn’t tried red velvet before, only heard about it, usually in the form of cupcakes. We tried the Waldorf Astoria Red Velvet recipe – it’s a perfect density for decorating and the bonus is that it tastes good and isn’t dry (and pretty easy to make).

Will definitely make red velvet cake again – just got to remember to get lots of red food colouring each time!

The three cupcake flavours

I made three flavours which I was told were all delicious. I was too full by the time I had any, and could only handle a taste of the chocolate ones (I blame the bump taking up all of my valuable food space).

The first was Chocolate Cherry with chocolate fudge cream spiked with cherry liquer, and sprinkled with real chocolate hail. I would normally make them as Black Forest cupcakes with fresh cream but it was a bit too hot to do that in advance.

Chocolate cherry cupcakes

Then there was a Lemon Vanilla with a lemon buttercream and fruit jube on top. The little lemon wedges were candy I bought from the UK – so yummy and perfect as decoration.

Vanilla lemon cupcakes

Last was Lime and Coconut – though I completely forgot to put lime juice in it (just used zest), whoops! These were topped with Malibu buttercream, toasted coconut and a giant marshmallow

Lime and coconut cupcakes

The girls froze the leftovers and I’ve been told they defrotsed fine. I made myself some chocolate cupcakes yesterday and having them cold from the fridge today was not bad at all. Good to know I can keep iced cupcakes for when I have a random cupcake craving!