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| Birthday girl with a birthday cake |
A long time ago I used to think I had to do the things that didn't come naturally, now, I just go with the flow. I think one of the greatest things about getting older is learning to play to your strengths. I don't consider it a coincidence I married someone who worked in his otherwise misspent youth as a short-order chef. Then again, any man who arrives an hour early for a dinner at my house, smelling of after-shave, in a shirt he had appropriated from his brother, and strides into my kitchen with huge hobnailed boots on (OK, maybe the hobnails are an exaggeration), and proceeds to tell me what to do with the steak I was preparing, and then sets down to work alongside me and does not irritate the well, whatever out of me (I do not take kindly at all to others in my kitchen), well, reader, I had to marry him now didn't I? The weirdest thing was, when the other guests arrived (it was a team-building exercise), they figured we'd been an item for months but honestly, it was only when cooking together I decided to stop ignoring the fact that he'd been fancying me for months (or that's what Lizette said anyway). And the rest, as they say is history.
Except that we still need to eat. There's been a reason for me writing up all these recipes on this blog. It's a simple one. We use them. A lot. They are our tried-and-tested favourites. So, since our flow is to feed, it means that any child's party of mine gets to be all about, well, eating. A lot.
Now there are a few things I feel very deeply about; in a passionately positive sense. Butter, for one - and olive oil. Maldon sea salt. Fresh food. Equally, there are items that give me the heebie-jeebies, such as sweets made in China out of milk products during the melamine scare. While I'm not doctrinaire and we all need some sweet stuff in our life, and this blog attests to the sweeter side of life, I do try as much as possible to adhere to the following mantra, given by Michael Pollan in his brilliant NY Times article, Unhappy Meals:
"Eat food. Not too much. Mostly plants."
So this is what we serve to our guests, both adult and children, at our parties:
To drink, tea and coffee for the adults and for the kids, home-made lemonade, displayed her with some mint from our garden:
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| Home-made lemonade with mint and ice |
To eat, we have as vegetables the following, with a sweet chilli and feta cheese dip (shop-bought, I do cut myself some slack sometimes):
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| Vegetable sticks with healthy dips |
I find the fruit kebabs go down a treat. My boys made these today, how did you guess? But threading a piece of paw-paw (papaya), together with a chunk of pineapple and a strawberry make a small kebab that is perfect for small tummies:
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| Fruit kebabs or skewers with pineapple, strawberries and papaya or paw-paw |
We make mini-pizzas using the pizza dough recipe and take out from the freezer ready-made pizza tomato paste (these are the kids pizzas, the adult ones my husband made with capers and anchovies got eaten so fast I never had one or got to document them either):
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| Home-made mini-pizzas |
OK, the devilled egg recipe I will have to provide. But essentially all you do is hard-boil eggs, scoop out the yolks, throw them into a mixer with mayonnaise, tomato sauce and some salt and then put the mixture through a large nozzle if you want it to look exceptional. I did add a wee bit of extra pink colouring to them, my daughter is a girly-girl after all.
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| Pink devilled eggs with tomato sauce and mayonnaise |
Bethany's cake is made with the firm birthday cake recipe, with buttercream frosting or butter icing. However, I made it a triple layer of cake and used what we call caramel treat but the Americans and French refer to as dulche de leche for the inner filling.
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| Firm birthday cake with butter icing and dulche de leche filling |
Allright, I admit, it was meant to be two double-layer cakes, one for the kids and one for the adults, but at 3am this morning, what with it being cold in our part of the world, I forgot to use that most essential tool, a spatula, to ensure even distribution of the slightly cold butter throughout, and given that I doubled up the mixture, well, yes, the one cake ended up with a lump of butter in it (guess where?), and well, um, we had a slight explosion:
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| An explosion caused by a blob of butter in the cake mix |
But my sons were delighted - "Yay, a disaster!" they cried. "We can eat cake for breakfast". And they did.
We did have some sweets - the party-pack consisted of small bags of sweets hidden in a game of pass-the-parcel, where every child got to win. They went down, well, a treat. Since that's what sugars really are, a treat. Not a meal.
So this is our kind of birthday party, a little laid-back, a lot of food, not too much sugar, and a lot of fun.
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