I don’t cook. I just, argh I avoid it at all costs. I love to eat, but cooking is not my strong point so I tend to avoid it when possible. It’s why we got a thermomix, it’s why I encourage my husband and kids to cook 😉

Hosting Christmas meant a lot of cooking and creating, and I am happy to say that with much trepidation and anxiety I did pull it off and it was yummo but generally I will delegate all cooking tasks whenever possible!

The ONLY exception is that I like to make my sons birthday cakes. Our baby has his birthday on January 2nd, so it’s just the fuzziest time of year, everyone is on holidays, lots of shops are closed, money is usually tight, it’s budget-cake-DIY time!

This New Year we had our best friends staying with us for a few days, meaning long swims at our local beach baths together, the kids playing beautifully alllll day, and late evenings where the kids were asleep and the adults stayed up playing cards and drinking sangria out in our yard listening to the sound of the waves and birds.

After hosting Christmas and a lot of guests, then having our friends come to stay we had a lot of fun things keeping us busy so it was somehow 4:00pm on New Years Day (the day before my baby boys birthday) when I realised I had completely failed to think about the cake! Whaaaat?! I had the presents at home, we had invited friends and family to a park to play, but I had no cake! And being New Years Day, most places were shut hahaha #mumfail but one of my favourite quotes is ‘restriction is the father of creativity’ and I had no choice, so had to think quick. On a hot day, with friends over, I didn’t want to be in the kitchen for hours, and I’ve never handled fondant in my life, so that further limited my choices.

Thanks to Pinterest for inspiration, Coles for the budget piping bags and food colouring, and Aldi (two years ago) for the clearance shelf silicon number cake tins I had sitting in the cupboard collecting dust – I managed a pretty fun, ‘fire’ themed cake, for our Fireman Sam, Paw-Patrol-Marshall obsessed boy!

I used off the shelf, packet mix mud cake, the thermomix recipe for butter icing, and relied on these images from Pinterest and Google for inspiration – knowing that there were plenty of fire truck toys in our house 🚒

Full disclosure, the first attempt to ice the cake was HORRID! The gel red colouring only turned the small amount of icing pink, nothing like the fire red I needed. So after a lot of sangria had been drunk, the first mess has been scraped off, well it was 11pm when I was finally re-icing this creation, so I think it made me more flexible in my approach… #noregrets

Fire cake!

Big thanks to all our friends and family, some of who travelled over three hours to be with us today, it means so much that you would come and celebrate our boy with us.

Amy x