Happy 8th birthday Emily! We had the most amazing party this year at Bouncing Off The Walls, an indoor playplace full of bounce houses, inflatable obstacle courses, giant inflatable slides, a velcro wall, and tons of toys. If you have one near you, I highly recommend them for parties. They took care of everything, even making a list of which children brought which presents. I received a confirmation letter from them about a week before the party which included some helpful tips for a smooth running party. It included things like bringing extra socks and such, but it also said to find out in advance if any of the children attending have food allergies...I wasn't expecting that. It turns out that the manager has two children of her own with food allergies. I wish I could post pictures of all the kids playing, but since the grownups all got to play too we didn't take any pictures. Here is a picture of the happy birthday girl and her wonderful sister who decorated the cake for me.
The cake, by the way, was AMAZING! Some of you may have been around about this time last year when I wrote about how depressed I was, and part of the reason being that I had been trying to create a perfect cake recipe for over a year and I still hadn't mastered it. I quit trying for about 8 months. As a matter of fact, as is evident in my lack of recent blogging, I pretty much took most of last year off from cooking altogether. Well I guess I just needed a break, because now I am feeling excited about cooking again and am working on new recipes for my vegetarian/gluten free daughter. I just finished making her some biscuits and she said I "have to post them!". Anyway...back to the cake (I seem to be rambling, but I do that when I'm excited). I made a great chocolate cake but it was VERY chocolaty. I made a decent vanilla cake, but it had that slight protein shake flavor. Then it came to me...marble cake! I also found that by increasing my starches quite a bit I get a much lighter, fine crumbed cake. The only problem with that is that it seems to get stale much quicker, fortunately that wasn't an issue this time because the entire cake was polished off in one day. I am hoping to post the recipe next week. In the meantime I will leave you with one more picture of the most exciting cake I've ever made and some precious little party guests.
