Monday Mumbles No.1

Welcome to the first Monday Mumbles, I’ll be using this space to share some of my thoughts, recipes, recommendations, ideas, best buys, favourite things and anything else that pops into my head. For my first post I am going to tell you about my weekend and a fabulous cake I baked!

April is a birthday-heavy month for my family with 6 birthdays in 8 days, 3 of which are mine and both of my parents, so it tends to be an expensive month of present buying and celebrating. It also tends to be a month where we all put on a few extra pounds from all the eating! And this year has been no exception – my birthday was celebrated in style with all of my friends joining me for a BBQ at my house where we ate and drank to excess, with a sufficient hangover the next day to remind me that I am now less than a year away from my 30^th (Oh GOD!).

Me and the girls - looking good after 8 hours of drinking!

This weekend was both my parent’s birthdays, with my mum’s being her 60^th – so big celebrations were in order. Andy and I and my brother and his girlfriend spent the weekend at my parents’ house down in Worthing; we had a light lunch in preparation for the gigantic dinner that was to come later, and went out for a little walk along the seafront which was unfortunately cut short by the rain.

Ready for dinner!

Dinner was at a little Turkish place on the seafront at Worthing called The Istanbul, we’ve been there before and the food is always amazing and the service is great. We went the whole hog with a full 3-course meal, everybody leaving feeling suitable stuffed! I had Calamari to start, Chicken Guvec for main and Baklava for dessert…. YUMMY! We decided to go home for coffees so that we could veg on the sofa to allow us to digest.

I’d also baked a birthday cake for my mum from a new book I was given for my birthday (Red Velvet & Chocolate Heartache by Harry Eastwood). It’s an amazing baking book with all the recipes using vegetables in the cakes instead of butter and other fats, and the cake tasted AMAZING – unbelievably moist and light. I chose a chocolate cake which contained butternut squash, it was decorated with a sumptuous icing (the icings do contain butter and other fats) and decorated with spray roses. I hope you’ll agree that it looked scrumptious because it certainly tasted it!

The cake!