I don't know why it has taken me so long to get around to posting this but it is finally up.
My favourite thing for my birthday is to make a cake and share it with my friends. This year I made cupcakes and decorated them with some pretty paper cups and fancy icing tips I got from Bake It Pretty (I got the "Best-ever Cupcake Decorating Kit" and the bavarian rose cups). Be warned - those big tips use a lot of icing; I had to make a second batch to finish decorating my cupcakes.

I thought it would be nice to share some birthday cake with all of you but didn't really think the cupcakes would do all that well going through the mail so here is the next best thing.

This is our family recipe for Birthday Cake. It is always called that, even when it's being made for some other occasion. I got it from my mum, who got it from her mum, who got it from a friend. It's a nice heavy pound cake especially well suited for making into shapes (we had some pretty cool birthday cakes growing up) and makes wonderful cupcakes, even if you don't ice them.


Ingredients:
1 cup unsalted butter (softened)
2 cups white sugar
3 eggs
1 tsp vanilla

3 ½ cups cake and pastry flour (not self-rising)
1 tsp baking powder
salt

1 ⅓ cups milk

Cream butter and sugar, add eggs and vanilla and beat until light and fluffy. Sift dry ingredients together into another bowl. Add dry ingredients and milk alternatively to the egg mixtures as follows: dry, milk, dry, milk, dry. Bake in a 9" x 13" pan for about 50 minutes at 350℉.

For 2 dozen cupcakes, spoon batter into paper lined muffin tins to ⅔ full. Bake for 20 to 25 minutes at 350℉.


4 tbsp unsalted butter
2 cups icing sugar
½ tsp vanilla
¼ cup milk

Cream butter with some of the sugar. Add vanilla and milk and stir to combine. Add the rest of the sugar and stir until smooth.


This version makes icing that pipes nicely and holds its shape well.

2 tbsp unsalted butter
2 tbsp vegetable shortening
2 - 3 cups icing sugar
½ tsp vanilla
¼ cup milk


For a brighter flavour this time I substituted the zest of a lemon for the vanilla in the cake and the juice of half a lemon for the vanilla in the icing (which is probably part of why it took my three cups of icing sugar to get nice firm icing).

You can't go hungry with a bowl of dough in the fridge.

A couple of times now Rob and I have got home for lunch to realize that all we've got to eat is some boxed soup and then I remember the dough in the fridge and make pitas. They are delicious and soft and only take about 10 minutes to make from start to table (and if you're feeling decadent they are wonderful brushed with melted butter).

Thursday we didn't even have any soup; we just had dough. Rob suggested I start some pitas anyway because then at least we'd have pitas. As I was getting the dough out and turning on the oven we both realized that instead of pitas with jam or peanut butter or whatever we could put stuff on them before they went into the oven and have pizzas instead.

I rolled the dough out while Rob chopped up some olives and a bit of leftover onion. When I tidied up my piles of flour he covered the rounds with a little sauce, a few onion and olive pieces and a sprinkling of mixed shredded cheese. I slide them into the oven and set the time for a minute longer than pita (so six minutes) to account for the cheese.

Seven minutes later we were sitting down to eat. The pizzas were delicious and simple. We'll have to do it again.

We went to the Noodle House for lunch yesterday. We hadn't been there for a long time and the food was so good. I love the big chunks of ice the give you in your drink.


Rob had the combination beef noodle soup - cooked beef, rare beef and beef balls on top of noodles and been shoots in good, hot broth.


I had saté beef and spring rolls on vermicelli - lettus and cumcumber and lots of ground peanuts too.