First birthday and how to get cake tins for one use
The last year’s gone so quickly…my baby’s not a baby any longer, he’s a one year old toddler. It was his first birthday yesterday, plus with him having started walking a couple of weeks ago, he’s definitely moved into toddlerdom.
It was a very low key birthday, no party, just a normal day with a few presents, seeing lots of family members who dropped in, and of course cake. I’m not a great cake baker – well, I enjoy baking (it’s very theraputic mixing and exciting seeing how it’s turned out), but I’m usually much better on small cakes like brownies or cookies. But of course I had to try a proper birthday cake.
I decided on a really simple chocolate cake to be made into a 1 shape. Turned out my local cook shop rents out number cake tins (great idea), but with working and not being able to get into town the day when I wanted to make the cake, it would have worked out a bit too expensive and too much stress out. I’d seen a couple of online tutorials saying you could make a number 1 from swiss rolls etc, but I just decided I’d make the cake in a couple of loaf tins and just cut to shape then cover in buttercream.
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In terms of the recipe itself I found a Nigella ‘Malteser cake‘ one in her Feast book which looked great and pretty easy, plus I find her recipes never fail which is pretty essential when relying on them for something important. I had a large loaf tin, put some of the batter into a second smaller loaf tin to do the base and sticky out bit of the 1, and then once they were cooled just sliced them in half, filled with the buttercream, cut the second loaf to the required shapes and glued them together/covered with the rest of the icing. Instead of maltesers I used giant buttons for decoration and of course a candle (although N wasn’t that fussed about that). He just wanted cake.
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In terms of presents, it was mostly books really. I love cheap discount book shops and find they’re great for books – think I bought 4 for a fiver kids books plus a bargain ‘Stories for One Year Olds’. Hopefully we’ll start being a bit better with bed time stories now he’s a little older and he will want to hear a whole story instead of looking at a couple of pages, and then shutting the book on my hand! His big present was a bargain Pintoy wooden blue trike that I got a while back for about 75% off the full price. Definitely worth getting even though he also had a ride on toy for Christmas. He loves it and although his feet don’t quite touch the floor, he always wants pushing round on it, or likes pushing it around himself walking alongside.
He also had a Happyland school. My online baby friends have quite an obsession with Happyland which I’d not known about, but now I can understand it having watched N playing quite contentedly with the people, slide & chairs for 20 minutes. He’s really starting to play with toys which have real meaning, and although he doesn’t know what they all are, he’ll quickly copy what i do with them, and do his own thing. Although I do think that he thinks everything is a shape to be put in a hole at the moment…shapesorter, people put into the slide’s middle, mega bricks put into their case. All very amusing to watch, but all part of development.
So that’s his first big birthday over and done with, now to watch him developing into a proper little boy.
How did you celebrate your little one’s first birthday?
happy 1st Birthday what a lovely cake you made! Looks like he had a lovely day