And it was a success...

If you know me at all, I don't cook, bake or vacuum.

Yesterday, I did two of the above mentioned, because I wanted to make Steve's birthday special. I took half a day off work (and Steve didn't have a clue I was planning all this) and decided to bake a surprise birthday cake, and to cook a special birthday dinner. So, with the help and moral support from dearest Fely, I embarked on this challenge (I don't care what you think, it is a challenge to me)

After rushing around Sainsbury's grabbing all the ingredients I needed, I came home and happily laid out all the ingredients ready to start because I knew I needed all the time in the world for everything to go according to plan. ALAMAK, then I realised the Vanilla Extract that I had put in the shopping trolley must have fallen out before I got to the check out so I was missing the single most important ingredient !! So, I jumped in the car again, raced to Tesco, got my missing ingredient, and raced back. So now the picture is complete.

So I printed out the recipe from here and got started.

A good start?

It is surprising the number of oranges and lemons you need in order to generate a substantial amount of rind from them.

Kenwood chef working hard...

So far so good?

Cake finally in the oven. Unfortunately I was too eager to stick the cake batter in the oven so I forgot to take a picture of it before it went into the oven. I am not in the habit of licking cake batter, as you can see...

Fresh from the oven...

Cooling down...

After a layer of chocolate icing... Fely's expert recipe and opinion was a GREAT help... thanks hun...

At this stage, I started to panic a bit about running out of time and I started doing EVERYTHING all at once -- decorating the dining room, wrapping the presents, writing the card, dashing back into the kitchen to check on the icing to see if I could start writing on it...

And the finished product....I was told later on that decorating it with fresh orange segments, not a very good idea... but I thought they looked nice anyway....Notice the word 'Birthday' being shortened? By the time I had finished writing 'B' I knew I wouldn't have enough space to fit in 'irthday' in that tiny space... :P

 After the cake, I quickly cleared all the dishes away, getting rid of all the evidence of a cake being made, and got started with preparing dinner -- Shoulder of pork steaks marinated in black pepper and char siu sauce, and stir fried kai lan with mushrooms...

The birthday boy blowing his candles after dinner.... he was still wearing his chef trousers after a hard day's work...poor thing had to work on his birthday...

 As you can see the cake went down quite well so I took it as a sign that it must have been quite a success...

A special thanks to my dear, dear friend Fely who was there for me the whole time...