12 of 12, August 2019

So, umm, apparently people having birthdays like to have cakes. I kind of knew this, but in a household of one this hadn’t been a pressing requirement of domestic life. However, with the household now larger, and with both youngsters having birthdays in early August, it was time for cake making … and, not just cake making, but cake decorating.

First we mix the cake.

Then we cool the cake (and admit that I cheated with a packet mix, because there were other time-consuming things to be done with the cake and I was too lazy/busy/unconfident to make it from scratch).

Then we get on with some things for work. Last year Coles ran a promotion giving away lots of little versions of shopping items, and it occurred to me that you could do a whole bunch of interesting maths activities associated with scale and ratio and proportion, so I bought the full size versions of the items for comparison (for example, the juice and the Vegemite jar do not appear to have been scaled at the same scale).

The thing about the birthdays is that there is now a second L-plater in the household. At the moment, the older L-plater gets to drive to school.

And then I continue to work, where I must have had to go for a walk somewhere for some reason which I can’t recall two months later when I am finally adding the text to this post!

When I got home, the birthday girl (whose birthday it wasn’t quite yet) was naming the collection of cactuses that she had been given.

I then set to turning a round cake into a cactus cake, which involved cutting and patching, lots of sickly green icing, and some little chocolate freckles.

I wanted to ice on some spikes, but the cake decorating kit I’d bought didn’t have a fine enough nozzle, so I improvised one using a plastic bag and a bottle lid with a hole punched in it.

It kind of worked. The birthday girl liked it well enough, which was the main thing.

(For completeness — and to mark the novelty of needing to do two decorated birthday cakes after doing such things only rarely in the past — here is a photo of the birthday boy’s toxic-sugar lolly cake from a few days earlier, which he shared with some of his friends at the sleepover birthday party he had (where, as is expected of these occasions, not much sleep was had).)

And at the end of the day, it was time to take the garbage out.

Oh, and I apologise for the confusing changes of tense in this entry. I’m not going to bother fixing this, even though I know it will probably annoy me into the future. It may annoy you too, but I’m not even sure that there is any “you” out there who reads this any more!

(The “12 of 12” project involves taking 12 photos on the 12th of the month (actually, it usually involves taking more). Some days the day is just an everyday day; some days things are a bit more adventurous. I have been doing this since 2009, and this is episode 120.)