Mum's birthday, or, mission impossible

Today was Mum's birthday.

So we started out by cooking a cake. This may not sound a big deal, but mum is allergic to gluten, wheat, sugar, dairy, eggs, iodine, yeast... suffice to say, that building a cake which looks like a cake, and tastes not like a metal sponge is verging on mission impossible stuff. difficult.

But we have found a solution: There are a couple of new brands available at the local supermarket

• Easy Bakers yeast, dairy & wheat free flour. From Lauke Flour. Which is actually flour that looks and feels like real wheat flour, and not (to randomly choose something) re-fried dirt.
• Orgran, gluten free, No Egg - which is an egg replacement.

We sort of followed the "basic cake" recipe on the flour box. Flavia inevitably asks me why we can't at least follow the actual recipe once before deciding that it won't work without substantial creative input. I don't know why recipes are written that way, but the answer is we just can't.

So. Into 250g of the nifty flour (correct to recipe) sieved, we added 5 heaped teaspoons of No-Egg should have been 4 whole eggs. We also added 150mL fresh-squeezed orange juice that should have been 100mL water and some water because it wasn't looking wet enough and about 20 drops of Sugarine should have been 75g of sugar. I also accidentally added 1/2 a teaspoon of the vanilla essence we have in the cupboard in a moment of non-concentration. We then cut a super-ripe banana and dropped the slices into an concentric-round cooking dish (it was supposed to be a flat square tray) covered the banana in nutmeg and cinnamon the recipe is just looking at me shaking it's head with a why-oh-why do I even bother type look and poured in the (rather small looking) batter. It was starting to rise and bubble in the mixing bowl.

Oven at 150C correct to recipe and the whole thing cooked in about 10 minutes which I take to be reasonable when the recipe said 30 minutes or when golden. The batter was golden when I put it in, so no help there, and after all, they hadn't accounted for half the stuff I did o their recipe..... We just did the classic toothpick test a few times.

Mum loved the cake, it actually tasted like banana bread, and we started the day with a completely out of time and tune happy birthday song in English and Portuguese. Lilly helped blow the candles out, delivered the present, opened the present, stuck her head in the bag and shouted There's chocolate! and after handing Mum the chocolate, shouted And a scarf! So the surprise element of the present may have been lost.

Astute readers may wonder, with all those allergies, what we're thinking giving Mum chocolate for her birthday, but it's (again a recent find) Sweet William chocolate which I have to say is one of the best foods we've found for Mum ever. It is milk, sugar free, but still tastes close to real chocolate.

We've previously bought mum membership to the National Gallery of Australia, and so we took Mum for the first time to the "members lounge". She was impressed with the view and the service. Lilly loved looking at the forest from above, and watching the people walking around the trees. I carried Gabriel in the Baby Bjourn, facing outwards this time, and he had a great time. Never complained once.

In the lounge Flavia noticed some lilies in water - and pointed them out to Lilly. Lilly was fascinated that flowers have names. So after returning home, she noticed that we had some flowers in vases on the table. These are Lillies! No, they are camellias. Oh. All flowers have different names. We looked around the house and pointed to some pansies Lilly had planted a while ago. Pantsees? Pansies. Ah. And did Lilly remember the little tiny blue flowers that grew in the grass outside? Mum asked her What do you think they are called? Harry.

So we now have some tiny blue grass flowers which are named Harry.

We've ended the day with watching the first Mission Impossible movie, it seems appropriate.

Party

Little Miss 3 has arrived.

We wrapped the presents last night, and placed them out in the room for Lilly to find this morning when she woke up. Which she did, at 8am, to squeals of "Santa brought presents!" after all, who else shows up in the dark to deliver presents?

We had our usual pancakes for breakfast, followed by watching two Barbie DVD's and a Disney princesses movie. As part of the preparation, Flavia made brigadeiros - Milo + Condensed milk rolled in chocolate sprinkles. We tried a recipe she'd found which was skim milk and sugar with some coconut, but too much coconut milk sent it into soup world. We modified the recipe, and I record it here for posterity.

Coconut balls 1 cup (skim) milk powder; 3/4 cup sugar; 1 tin coconut cream; milk (to make it like a soup); icing sugar; 2 to 3 cups desiccated coconut; zest of 1 lemon. Put in liquid ingredients with sugar, make a soup. Add solids until mix becomes thick enough to roll balls. Roll in desiccated coconut.

Flavia felt it was one of the worst concoctions made, but I enjoyed them a lot.

The hall that was rented for the party was in Melba - an old pre-school apparently, that had become a community hall. One whole wall of the building was mirrored - which resulted in lots of running in circles by 3 year olds -- with slow stretches as they observed themselves careening past in the mirror.

The fairies were excellent - providing cupcakes, pink lemonade and a birthday cake, as well as pass-the-parcel, treasure hunt and various other activities. Lilly loved it, and the other kids seemed to enjoy themselves immensely.

So little Miss 3 returned home, and since 7:45pm has been sound asleep after her party.