Children’s birthday’s are often an emotional time for parents, remembering how far you’ve come to get from newborn to ‘wherever’ you are at, the ups, downs and day-to-day journey your family has been on, the passing of another year in their lives is worth celebrating.
When we first moved to the Netherlands I found it quite strange that people congratulated me when it was one of my children’s birthday’s (even my mum was congratulated when she visited us on Dolly’s birthday, much to her bemusement), in fact, the whole family is congratulated when one of us has a birthday…but now I ‘get’ it and love it, it’s like saying “well done, you’ve made it through another year! You are here, you are together and you are alive!”.
This week we celebrated our Dexie turning 6. He requested an Owl cake (we always try to make whatever cake the kids like, it’s become a bit of a family tradition…not to mention challenge (see last years Pirate ship!!), for some reason Dex had an Owl theme going on, he drew a picture of an owl to be made into his birthday invitation (lucky his daddy is a graphic designer eh?) and I made owl cookies as the traktatie (school favours traditionally given out to class friends here in Holland).
The Owl bisciuts are from a tutorial I found on Pinterest here, I subsituted currants, pressed into the eyes 3 – 5 mins before the bake was finished (to stop them burning) for the bakers chocolate chips, as it’s hard to find those in regular stores in NL.
For the chocolate cake, I used a Delia Smith ‘all-in-one sponge’ recipe with cocoa powder instead of vanilla extract, 2 layers of sponge with fresh whipped cream and strawberries sandwiched in the middle. The choclate on the outside is a mousse recipe as I think that butter cream is too sweet, the mousse is quite rich…but very delicious and just a small piece is plenty, this cake cuts into many servings, so you can invite lots of friends to celebrate with you.
So, what do six year olds want? Cake, owl cake in our case…and lots of it! x