Arthur has had a fantastic Birthday weekend. Saturday he had a special Birthday day with his best friend. Tony took them to the Haynes Motor Museum to see the Alien Invasion. While I got ready for Arthur's Birthday party the next day, baking biscuits and a Dinosaur cake and doing a general tidy up. Ted and Arthur manged to test the biscuits and cake and have a preview birthday tea.The cake started as above, I had an idea for a Volcano cake, but really wasn't sure how I would go about it. I looked at tins that would have been perfect but cost more than buying a cake! Tony had the brain wave of making lots of layers, I had already decided on doing marbled cake to give the affect of rock layers. So I made 2 victoria sponges but divided the mixture into 2 before putting in the tins, 3 tablespoons of cocoa powder and 2 tablespoons of boiling water (to mix powder into paste) were added to one, and vanilla esscence to the other then the cake mixture was blobbed into the tin, some of each mixture, then mixed gradually to make the marbled effect. The second cake I added red food colouring and strawberry cordial.
The icing was made using my special recipe of not quite set fudge mixed with icing sugar..sets like rock :) Arthur helped add the finishing touches.
I was quite pleased at how it came out, not all of my cake ideas work am better working with wool ;)
Arthur was very pleased with it.
The layers worked really well.
Arthur had 4 friends over to tea, and we had been preparing all day. There were masks to make..
Bones to discover, I was going to use the ready made plaster ones, but felt they may not be as good for 5 yr olds as discovering these bones and building them after.
Arthur did a little test. We also buried lots of fossils (George had a big collection) so it was great telling the boys all about how fossils are made and they were really from Dinosaur times.
I think they enjoyed it, my brushes were totally wrecked, my face when I saw them made the boys laugh ;)
Tony built a cave and we did a chalk dinosaur egg hunt, then the boys did some amazing cave painting, all this lasted about a minute!! was like a whirl wind going around the house.
Tony had been experimenting for 2 days (shouting 'come and see' each time) with Coke bottles,mints and bicarbonate of soda, in the search of the highest Volcano...he went through 10 bottles of tonic water 2 tubs of bicarb,20 packets of mints, and approx 20 coke bottles (luckily it was the 19p stuff).
In the end he found Minto's in Coke to be the best, but the mints had to be attached to a wire to keep them at the bottom of the bottle, otherwise they floated to the top and blocked the flow... so at one stage he was drilling holes into mints *slaps hand on face* we did point out someone had invented polo's but apparently they were not as good. It was good fun for the boys, counting the mints and seeing the reaction and doing the countdown.Above is the mints going in..
Then Tony gets ready to run..
and we have blast off..
Reach for the sky!
and up passed the boys who are standing on the balcony shouting that's rubbish do it again ;)
The grand Finale was the Volcano exploding. It was a really fun couple of hours..
and I was so glad I'd tidied up before hand noooot! Luckily our kitchen is downstairs so we could leave the mess and enjoy a tea and later a wine upstairs :)
