More Cake!

So, it was Ellie's birthday earlier this week. I had been asking her for weeks what she would like on her cake and she had various half-hearted suggestions: Hello Kitty, Snow White, Izzy (from Jake and the Neverland Pirates - Ellie's favourite programme!) but she never seemed that enamoured with any of them. 
One morning she was sat at the kitchen table waiting for me to finish making her pancakes when all of a sudden she gave a mighty shout, scaring me silly:

Ellie: I know what I can have have on my cake, Mummy!
Me: What's that then?
Ellie: JESUS!
Me: I beg your pardon?
Ellie: I can have Jesus on my cake (big pleased grin on her face)
Me: Why do you want Jesus on your cake?
Ellie: Because He just had his birthday and we should always be thankful to Him when we get presents!
Me: Right...Well...yes, we should be grateful but I don't think it's very respectful to have Him on your birthday cake. Perhaps you can think of something else?
Ellie: Fine. I'll have a pink one like Jasper's christening cake then (looking rather huffy). 

What do we think? Isn't it a little blasphemous to have Jesus on one's birthday cake? 

So, I took my inspiration from Jasper's christening cake, as she requested, and made a pink, girly version. It was quite a tall cake - with five layers (albeit fairly thin ones) in alternating pink and plain madeira sponge (lemon flavoured). The buttercream was also lemon flavoured - quite strongly - to try to counteract the sweetness of the icing sugar.

Here it is!

 

 

We had a little tea party to celebrate Ellie's birthday, and played a couple of games (pass the parcel and musical statues). In doing so we discovered that Jasper absolutely loves music and dancing! Obviously I don't mean that this is the first time in his entire 14 months that he's heard music. It's just he's never really paid much attention to it, other than bobbing up and down a bit to the nasty electronic music on some of his toys. This time he was really getting excited by the music we played (Now 83 - just right for a bunch of 5 year olds!) and every time the music was paused he burst into tears. Poor sausage! 

Jasper is a little emotional at the moment because he's just getting over chickenpox (having also had his MMR vaccination between contracting it and the spots appearing. This meant that the two viruses (as measles is a live vaccine) combined to make poor Jasper's temperature rocket to over 40C. This lasted for two days and then thankfully went back down to a less worrying level. It seemed that we were spending most of our waking hours either at the doctors or on the phone to them! He is also cutting his canines and so has had a pretty rough few weeks.The girls both had chickenpox (within a fortnight of one another) a couple of years ago so that's all three of them now. I remember having it when I was 5 and it wasn't a pleasant experience. It gets worse the older you get and so I'm glad they've all had it nice and young!