Birthday helper

It was Mr Meet-Cute's birthday last month and Ray helped me with decorating and wrapping some presents.

We used these 'playon' crayons, that are good for little hands. Ray was quite interested in how they tasted. Not so much with the scribbling on the paper.

He was quite good at putting the 'finishing touch' stickers on the parcels after they were wrapped. He also contributed some lovely dribble spots.

The card!

The cake! I used this recipe to make a delicious, moist orange cake with a crunchy top. I felt it needed a bit more birthday festive-ness though so I added the heap of chocolate ganache to top it off.

Ray is one!

So another thing that happened is that Ray turned one! We had a party at the park to celebrate with friends, and Ray's godmother came down from Sydney. We all had a blast! Especially the birthday boy who was lapping up the attention in his special birthday crown. He even got into his birthday cake, and was grabbing fistfuls and shoving it in his mouth. I can't tell you how good it is to see him enjoying his food.

I put this together for the Miracle Babies facebook page. When Ray was born it took me a while to share any photos online. He had so many tubes and things keeping him alive, it's quite a hard thing to see. The first time I visited the NICU and saw all the tiny babies like that I just cried and cried. Then, during Ray's time there it became the place where I spent all my waking hours. But that's all behind us now, and Mr Meet-Cute and I can enjoy being parents to a normal, healthy boy, who has just started crawling and is into everything already, Eek!

TD update

Mr Meet-Cute made me this ace card for my birthday yesterday. Was a pretty low key day seeing as I'm still in hospital! But, even though it's quite depressing having your birthday in hospital, it's good I'm still here because it means that Tiny Dugong has been staying put. I'm in my 28th week now, and third trimester, so if I did go into labour now the risks associated with premature babies at this stage are a lot lower.

Thanks Grumpy Cat!

I'd been feeling pretty emo and crappy all week, I blame preggo hormones and being really really over being stuck here! I wasn't going to bother trying to do anything birthday related, but then last minute changed my mind and ended up having a lovely birthday evening, with pizza and cheesecake and faux bubbles!

V.Day B.Day

These are some instagram pics I took yesterday during Valentines Day, which was also more importantly my birthday! I received some lovely birthday prizes, such as the small grey mountain cushion by Hilary Grant, and an awesome Calourette necklace. I'm trying not to freak out too much about the wrinkles in my forehead in that photo above, which even the instagram blur function can't hide. Old-timer alert, Eek!

Three Milk Cake

Though I love cooking, I'm generally a pretty lazy cook. I like quick, uncomplicated recipes - anything that takes longer than an hour tops and I'll start to get angsty. However, now and then I feel the need to challenge myself by trying something new. I usually make some kind of huge deluxe cake for Mr Meet-Cute's birthday, but seeing as we spent his birthday in New York this year I really missed not being able to make a cake for him. When I came across this recipe for Nook Eatery's Pastel Tres Leches cake, I decided that a belated birthday cake was exactly what was needed.

Things you need to know about this cake:

• It contains a whole tin of condensed milk. I have been obsessed with condensed milk since childhood when my best friend and I would buy tins and consume the whole thing a spoonful at a time. We also may have done this a few times as grown ups… you could call it a tradition.
• The cake itself wasn't really that complicated to make. I found the meringue topping to be more of a challenge.
• You use 3 egg whites to make the meringue topping, and then you can use the leftover egg yolks in this recipe for Nook's Perfect Hollandaise. 
• The recipe is described as being "So rich that small portions are key", which sounded like a challenge if ever I heard one.
• They were right about it being rich. The cake needs to set for four hours, or overnight, so after all that waiting when I finally had a slice I cut myself the hugest piece ever, and ate it with cream… and it was amazing. But I did need to lie down and not move afterwards.

Bookish

Don't you just love checking out people's bookshelves? They tell you so much about a person. These are my sisters books and it's pretty obvious what her interests are - music, art and fashion! It's her birthday today, so I just wanted to say: Happy Birthday Loulou Blue!

They Say it's Your Birthday #2

It was one year ago today that Banana Meet-Cute was born! Woweeee!! I have had so much fun over the past year with this silly lil' blog. Starting out I decided my blogging philosophy was that it didn't matter whether anyone out there was reading my blog or not, because it was something that I was doing for my own enjoyment … but I still get so excited and am so chuffed by you blog visitors! And comments or links back here are just the icing on the cake. So thank you so much all you fantastic and good looking readers out there!

In honour of this occasion, I thought I would re-post these photos from one of my favourite, and very first blogposts. (Have just realised this is a bit of a sad note to end this Birthday Blog Post, le oops.)

"On October 9th, 1980 Yoko Ono organised this skywriting for the joint birthday party of John Lennon (who was turning 40) and Sean Lennon (who was turning 5). The party was held at the Tavern on the Green in New York City."

John Lennon would have turned 71 on October 9th of this year.

Valentine Baby

Blah blah Valentines Day. Do you know what else today is? It's my birthday!!! Every year I share the day of my birth surrounded by Valentines Day couples. Well, not really, but I do usually go out for dinner on my birthday and I am always surprised by the amount of couples who are out on Valentines day dates.

Anyway, I have had a lovely birthday so far already, and am feeling quite the spoiled banana! Check out the awesome owley cake below made my very clever friend Pikkujen!

Happy V-Day everybuddy! xxx

Banana Birthday

It was Mr Meet-Cute's birthday the other day and I made this Guinness Chocolate Cake. The recipe was not too complicated and the result was pretty delish, if I do say so myself! Once the cake is iced it's meant to look like a tall dark pint of Guinness, topped with frothy white cream. Well, my icing kind of slumped all over the top so I didn't quite get that visual effect. I don't think anyone cared about that though. Happy Birthday Mr Meet-Cute XXX !

They say it's your birthday

The photos above were taken during a party held for John Lennon's 40th and Sean Lennon's 5th birthday at the Tavern on the Green, New York in 1980. John Lennon would have turned 70 on October 9th of this year. All photos are from beatlephotoblog.com