A Birthday

Way back at the start of March I had a birthday. It was a Friday, I had too much work to do to take the day off, but we had breakfast in the park beforehand and afterwards there were cocktails at Skylon, dinner at Nopi, and afterwards more cocktails in a wandering bar.

It was lovely.

There was also an amazing, completely-took-me-by-surprise, home baked lemon and poppy seed birthday cake from H. With candles! And party bags to take any leftover slices home in! Times like this when having friends in the Women's Institute rocks.

Birthday Tea

Sunday 6th March. A birthday afternoon tea. Cucumber sandwiches, cut into fingers, no crust. Egg and cress too. Scones, clotted cream, damson jam, strawberry jam, made with fruit from the garden last summer. Chocolate cupcakes, lemon drizzle, blondies made by a WI friend. Birthday cake, made and iced by Mum, sponge, buttercream, jam, thick white icing, nostalgia on a plate.

Tea, lots of it.

Alpine Strawberries, Victoria Sponge

After the lavender, and the bumblebees, gem-like alpine strawberries picked from underneath crinkle edged leaves. Afternoon tea and cake in the garden, many, many photos taken trying to capture the exact scarlet of the berries, the green of the leaves, until Dad started huffing about time wasting and grabbed his slice of cake.

Now it is raining, heavily, with the odd groan of thunder. I am facing the prospect of a journey home in inappropriate shoes, and Sunday afternoon (both the last one and the next) seems a long way away.

Also, a big thank you to Lisa-Marie for the blog award, very sweet of you!

In which my oven behaves...

On Friday I made a batch of blueberry muffins for the weekend's breakfasts, and on Sunday I made a rather successful Victoria Sponge, complete with the homemade raspberry jam from a couple of posts ago, which I took to work today for a colleague's birthday. And my oven* behaved nicely for once and didn't burn either of them, although I did have to hover over it, and at one point intervene with some tin foil.

* which is somewhat temperamental due to it being a) very old and b) having a broken thermometer