Jottage from Lancaster - Tristan and Amelia's birthday

We went to Cambridge for Tristan's first birthday party which Heather has written about in her own Jottage. Tristan shares a birthday with his cousin, Amelia who was 3, and the celebrations were for her too. By the time we came down to the kitchen on the morning of the party for breakfast, Heather had already put the oven on and was busy preparing the last minute salad and cycled off to the supermarket to buy the final oddments. It was clear she had thought through the menu in some detail, and we were both musing on the difference that River Cottage had made to both our lives  which was so obvious when you looked at the table groaning with made-from-scratch food.


Of course the chocolate cake disaster was the one cloud on the horizon. The birthday cake should be the centre piece of the table, but it was pushed to the back so that perhaps no one would notice just how it hadn't risen. I can't explain why it went to wrong, but in the event the flat cake with candles was mostly eaten (although Amelia didn't actually eat hers, she was the only one). To my dismay, Ethan, who is almost 6 did comment on how flat it was but no one else said a word. 


The original Mary Berry cake, which had been crammed into a plastic box, was brought out later in the afternoon and picked at in small pieces by everyone. It was the nicer textured cake by far, but the geometrical problems made it rather unattractive (burnt and flattish on one side, well-risen on the other, and about 10 percent of it stuck to the budget-priced silicone cake mould). I had layered it with a tin of mandarins and soaked it in the juice then topped it with Greek yoghurt, which actually wasn't bad at all.

The cake, adapted for Amelia's 3rd birthday with a new centre candle

So now the birthday is over and I have a pinto bean chilli cooking on the stove - one of my favourite feel-good recipes from River Cottage Veg. I wouldn't be at all surprised if Heather wasn't already planning next year's celebrations!