Morning Tea...

...was a success! The cakes were delicious. Okay, well I'm skeptical about my chocolate cake. My family loved it but they're my family so they always love everything I make.

This morning I woke up early and returned to the kitchen to finish the cakes.

Unfortunately I ran out of icing sugar so had to skip icing the sides of the Carrot Cake. Needless to say I am not entirely happy about this. In addition to the cakes, we had a super sweet dessert called Gulab Jamun. It's a popular dessert from the Indian Subcontinent, and is a dough that is fried (a bit like donuts) and then put into a sugar syrup. It is so, so sweet, but so incredibly delicious! My mother is a master at making these, I definitely do not have the patience for the process.

Despite being absolutely exhausted from yesterday, I decided to make little cheesy puffs since the morning tea spread was severely lacking in savoury food. They were an absolute hit for something that took less than 15 minutes to pull together. But then again who doesn't love cheese and pastry.

(NB: I did in fact make more than this!)

We were only expecting cousin R and her mum to join us for morning tea, but in a surprising turn of events another couple of relatives dropped by. In an even stranger turn of events my mother had set an extra couple of places at the table for "no reason at all" other than to have some spare plates and cutlery should we need them. It all worked out well, lots of sugar was consumed (well, on my part anyway) and entertaining conversations were had.

I've had a couple of hours to relax a bit, and now another guest has arrived for afternoon tea. The beauty, of course, is that there is such an excess of food that no extra work is required :P

Preparing for a feast.

Tomorrow we have various guests coming over at various times during the day. In preparation for this my mother has found it necessary to cook up a feast. This, however, means that I get given instructions and have no choice but to assist and partake in all the craziness. As a result I have spent the day running errands and baking.

My sister, being the flower enthusiast that she is decided to cheer us up during our stressful morning of running errands by buying a bunch of beautiful ruby-red Gerberas. She also thought it would look lovely as a centre piece for the table tomorrow.

My sister and I were instructed that at least two cakes were to be made. So my cake of choice is the 'Over the Top' Chocolate Cake from the Buttercup Bake Shop Cookbook by Jennifer Appel. It is a super chocolate-y, rich and indulgent cake.

The batter was so smooth and creamy (always a good sign!)

Being lazy and faced with time constraints I decided to turn this usually three-layer cake into a single layer (but a enormously large layer at that!). It's currently cooling in its tin waiting for me to get muster up some motivation and inspiration to make some frosting and ice it.

My sister made a Carrot Cake (similar to the one here, but it's two-layers as per the original recipe). It too is currently waiting patiently for me to make some Cream Cheese Frosting. She also made a Key Lime Pie, which smells and looks so good right now. Cannot wait to dig in to that one!