Today my baby turned 4 years old. It was a hot day and we wanted to go for a swim later in the day, so we decided to start making the birthday cake when breakfast was finished. It was an easy job to mix the ingredients and put them into the cake pan, but for some reason I put the foil on top of the wire rack in the Weber instead of underneath it, and the bottom of the cake burned. So we cut the bottom of the cake off and iced the cake.

We had been told yesterday afternoon that the cake had to be a volcano cake. I was kind of hoping that the cake would rise in the centre when it cooked, but it was pretty flat when I took it out of the Weber. So we made a volcano-like mound in the middle of the cake with marshmellows and put brown icing all over it (because volcanos have to be brown). The cocoa to make the icing brown was provided by a fellow camper. Then I made some royal icing with icing sugar and egg white, and coloured it red, orange and green. The red and orange were to be the lava flowing down the side of the volcano, and the green to write Toby’s name on the cake.

Well, the final thing looked a bit of a mess, but the kids were ecstatic with the volcano cake. Because the day was so warm we decided to have the cake straight after lunch, and gave Toby his presents as well. Afterwards we went to the Thredbo pool and Nathan spent more than an hour going down the water slide while Toby spent nearly the same amount of time refusing to go down (after going twice with me at the start and he went under water so refused any more rides down the slide). Andrew finally talked Toby into going down with him and he held Toby out of the water at the end, and after that you couldn’t stop Toby….as long as he went down with Daddy.

Back at the tent site we had a fire to cook our dinner over, as requested by Toby, and marshmellows afterwards. Toby doesn’t like the marshmellows toasted, but he takes the opportunity of a fire to eat them uncooked.

Nathan writing a sign for the back of the camper advising people it’s Toby’s birthday today

Oohhh, a watch!

Nathan drying dishes

This entry was posted on Saturday, December 21st, 2013 at 7:20 pm and is filed under Birthday, Camping, Nathan, Toby the preschooler. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.