Tag Archives: birthday

Our everyday life: week 10

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After days of rain (most unusual here) the room we had stored our packing flooded…great start to the week ;)

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C’s first taste of lavashak

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C loves to hide toys under things and then ask you to fetch them. Of course Mama humours him!

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Hazelnuts, pre-roasting.

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Post-roast and lazily peeled. There were so many!

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C in love with his reflection…

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…and also in love with the dog!

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It was Mother’s Day in the UK on Sunday, but it’s in May in France, so technically I miss both. However, I did get a sweet little card (with some help from Papa!).

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Hazelnuts used in this birthday cake, as well as two jars of nutella (notella?)

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I think he enjoyed his birthday cake :)

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Bake

xoxo

Raw super-infused chocolate layer birthday cake

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For Shake’s birthday he asked me to make a special cake that we had seen on the wonderful and inspiring Green Kitchen Stories.

This was a cake with a difference for us; completely raw and with no added sugar!

The recipe was very simple to follow, but given the four different layers there were several steps involved. Due to the lack of time I had to find the required ingredients (we love you baby bakenshake!) I had to make a few amendments:

  • I couldn’t find coconut butter but used coconut oil and melted it as per the recipe in a small bowl of warm water.
  • Instead of nettle powder, I used the tea leaves from a nettle teabag we had in the cupboard, this meant that the colour wasn’t bright green but was still delicious.
  • I added a few tablespoons of a matcha tea we have to try to create the green effect, but it wasn’t very successful! No harm to the flavour but wasn’t so green.
  • I used a small glug of a Naked green machine juice we like which includes spinach (plus some other good things)
  • I omitted the peppermint essence and am not sure if I would include it next time if I find any, this layer was delicious as it was.

I really cannot recommend this cake this cake enough. It has been enjoyed by all of our family this weekend, old and young, despite what may be unusual ingredients for some. The combination of flavours works so well and it is both a pretty and interesting cake to look at.

Do let me know if you make it and any amendments you make to the recipe.

I’m definitely going to make the fudge layer again and divide it into small pieces for when I’m in need of a treat :)

Bake
xoxo

Birthday books for simple living

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My lucky day

I was a little ill on my birthday this year, but I received an exciting selection of books. I’m sure that many of these will be invaluable for our coming adventure.

I always ask for books, and my family always apologise for only buying me ‘boring’ books but I can assure you that none of these books are boring to me in the slightest. I’m so grateful they’re willing to humour me.

You can expect reviews over the coming months. First on their readability, and then a follow up once I’ve put them through the real hands-on test.

You can look forward to:

  • Basic Butchering of Livestock and Game
  • Your Bread Oven – Building it and baking in it (I have another post coming soon with one of my goals – you’ll never guess what that might be)
  • Small-Scale Grain Raising (only considering the possibility right now, I’ve no idea if this is actually viable for us)
  • Crust and Crumb (expect lots of photos of bread experimentation here)
  • The Bread Baker’s Apprentice (as above)
  • Gaia’s Garden
  • The Encyclopedia of Country Living (most books that try to cover such a wide range of topics only touch the surface of each, but at a glance this looks really useful)

I’ll spare you Experimental Design with Applications in Marketing and Service Operations and I’m not sure this blog is the place for Dawkins either, but they’ll can help keep my mind active.