HAPPY BIRTHDAY TO YOU...HAPPY BIRTHDAY TO YOU.

 Out for tea tonight. A rare occurrence for a Saturday night.  Lizzy Lou's birthday. (daughter in law).

So me being me, after being shown a pic of a fancy looking cake says "I can do that, I'll make it for your birthday"  I mean how hard can it be?

This is the cake..26 eggs worth of cake..

But we don't like the white butter icing and the hearts are a bit valentine's dayish and why do you have vanilla cake in there when more chocolate is so much better.  Chocolate everything it is.

"I can do this"

Friday night , make the chocolate cake for the top and bottom.  Make the roulade for the middle..24 egg yolks, 8 egg whites,  lots of stirring and folding. Cook , cook.  Take out of oven and leave over night.

So I still have all these egg whites left.  Brain wave, make 2 forgotten puddings.  So easy.  Put in the oven and forget about them till tomorrow as well.

Sleep.

Saturday morning is here.  Grandaughter arrives to be babysat.  She's not so well...falls asleep.

 I look at all the cake bits...scarey.

I'm going to make something else, the cake can wait a bit longer. But of course I don't have everything  I need so I send the man out shopping while I have a coffee and ponder my next moves.

He's back.  Grandaughters still asleep.  I'm off to the kitchen to make citrus jelly slice.  I get that all made but have to wait an hour for the jelly to cool.

I guess I have to tackle the cake.

We decided just to go for whipped cream in the roulade instead of buttercream.

So of course the roulade doesn't roll cos it sure looks more risen than the one in the pics (there's a step by step picture guide for making this)  its splits in places,  but I followed all the directions so I don't know.
Keep going anyway cos I mean 26 eggs!!

So I assemble my cake, ice it with chocolate butter cream and use lots of after dinner mints and chocolate curls to decorate.  Its  the highest cake I've ever made.  But its done.

Sure looks like the original lol.

Oh, and somewhere in between I finished off the citrus slice.

Just to be on the safe side (cos I'm really worried about the inside of this cake) I send the man out to the cheesecake shop ( a bit of a plug for them) to buy a strawberry fields cake.  We love these.  We have 1 every birthday.

And because I have nothing better to do, I whip up a snickers  slice just in case we don't have enough food.

(top pic is from my recipe file).

Lizzy arrives to pick up grandaughter and I get ready to go out.

We have main course and get down to the business of dessert.   I cut up the slices and decorate the forgotten pudding.

I decide to go with the bought cake as the birthday cake.  Now I'm too scared to cut the damn  tower of chocolate.

Happy birthday Lizzy.

The time has come,  I have to cut the cake.......here goes.

Well all things considered...................lol

Looks not too bad,  tastes not too bad,  but really hard to cut because it's so big.  Wouldn't make it again.

All in all another successful Saturday night and I couldn't go before the mini food critics had a look in..

She thought the cake was just fine lol.

Also through the week I made a choc bottom banana slice which was really yumm

see you next week.