Milo is completely loving and obsessing over this, The Usborne pull-back Busy Car Book.

A genius concept! A thick board book with grooves in the pages where you slot in the little red car that comes with it. Then you just pull back the car and watch it whizz round the busy town. There’s text on each page so you can read along as the car is driving and the illustrations are choc full of things to look at and talk about.

Milo adores it and I have to say there is something quite mesmerizing about watching the little car whizz about in its busy way. Love, love, love!

Thought you might like a glimpse into the rest of Milo’s moomin birthday party. I made moomin bunting from some gorgeous vintage moomin fabric sourced from this lovely lady on Etsy.

And moomin goody bags (I’m not a fan of plastic goody bags. This is a bit more of an expensive way of doing things though all the backing material is from bits and bobs I already had including a few old pillowcases!).

Milo practised his cutting skills on spare paper while I made these little cardboard moomin decorations. I left out all of Milo’s moomin books so the kids could have a look through (not sure how familiar his little friends are with the moomins!).

Moomin biscuits and pictures of the happy residents of Moominvalley enjoying foody delights were scattered over the buffet table. (used as coasters mostly!).

And a whole heap of other lovely foody items, including macaroons, jammy tarts, flapjacks and these pretty dairy-free cupcakes made from a recipe in the Bake-a-Boo Bakery cookbook which I LOVE and thank Melanie at Library Mice very much for recommending.

We had a second day of partying for family and friends who we couldn’t fit into our tiny house on the Saturday… with an extra Battenburg and apple streusel added to the cake selection baked on Sunday morning.

Oh, and did I mention that I made this car cake for his actual birthday to take into nursery to share with his friends. We had a little car-themed tea party with Milo, just the three of us, when he got home from nursery early on his birthday. Car biscuits, sandwiches, pizza, balloons and pressies… lovely. We wrapped up a new Moomin book on his bed for his bedtime reading. Moomin and the Winter Snow.

I don’t think my mixer has ever had such a busy week! Roll on Christmas!

Oh yes, and with regards to yesterday’s Bookish Bites and Milo’s Moomin cake, I had found a picture of the original illustration of Moominmamma’s cake in my Moomin cookbook. It’s here. Below. And so much more complicated than the one in Moomin and the Birthday Button. I chose to ignore its existence.

A while ago I posted about Milo’s request for his birthday cake for his birthday this year and well, that is pretty much the reason I haven’t been around here very much recently. Sorry about that. Between the moomin madness here and being busy, busy with work I’ve not had very much time. So, where to begin.

Do you remember the cake I’m talking about? It was the one from the spread below in Moomin and the Birthday Button.

Yes, the enormous chocolate cake that leans to the right and has some sort of pink splodgy stuff all over it and some sort of decorative wiggly bits on the front. Well, Milo didn’t give up. This was the chocolate cake he wanted for his birthday so this is what I made.

It took 16 eggs, 800 grams of flour and butter and sugar, 1,200 grams of icing sugar and a whole lot of time. Almost a whole day! I used my ever reliable Peggy Porschen chocolate cake recipe. I’ve made a wedding cake using this recipe before and it is super tasty and super sturdy and for a cake that’s four tiers I figured sturdy was completely necessary. I made two quantities of the 8 inch cake recipe. The first quantity for the bottom tier, just your regular 8 inch job, the second quantity for the remaining tiers – a six inch, a five inch and a little souffle tin. I had some mix left over from this and made some little chocolate cupcakes out of it.

Preparation was key… I got all the ingredients out the night before, all measured and what not and then managed to bake one of the sponges by 9am with the other one completely ready to go straight after (had a few other party items to bake that day so needed to create as much time as possible.)

Once the sponges were baked and cool, I cut them down to size ready for icing. A serious amount of chocolate cake off cuts.

Had some great suggestions as to what to do with them other than trifle or cream and a spoon. Fresh raspberries and cream (yum), chocolate sauce (also yum). Then it was time to get on with the chocolate buttercream. I decided to cover and fill with buttercream as it felt more birthday cakey. The picture in the book looks more like a smooth chocolate sugar paste finish but I’m really not a fan of the taste of chocolate sugar paste so chocolate buttercream it was. A lot of chocolate buttercream. I had to cover my mixer with two towels to prevent a huge amount of icing sugar dust escaping all over the house.

I then iced all the four tiers. The bottom three were made as actual cakes with buttercream filling, and the fourth top tier was just covered over in buttercream. The bottom tier was sat on a cake board, and the second tier up on a very thin cake board.

In order to secure all tiers so that they didn’t sink into each other I used dowelling rods in the bottom tier to hold the second tier up on its thin cake board. You can’t see the thin cake board once you’ve covered with chocolate buttercream. The top two tiers were small enough that I didn’t think their weight would create any problems though I didn’t want to construct the whole cake until the day of his party just in case! So, instead I got each tier completely finished ready to plonk one upon the other. This meant tackling the pink splodgy bits and for this I used pink and white sugar paste.

I cut out the shapes for covering the bottom, third and top tier  freehand using the appropriate sized tin to work from.

Once the sugar paste was moulded onto the tiers, I then cut out the curlicues for the second tier and stuck these to the buttercream. All the cake then got boxed up ready for the next morning and the final construction.

It was surprisingly easy to put it together, literally just a case of popping one tier upon another and adding a few glace cherries around the top of the first tier. Instead of the curlicues on the very top of the cake, I used three purple candles because my boy loves the colour purple and candles. Milo didn’t do the gasp of excitement I was slightly hoping for, probably because he’d seen the cake in its many stages but he did seem pretty happy with it. And then pretty happy with eating a huge chunk of it too! So here’s the final cake.

On the whole I was pretty pleased with the result. There are a few things I’d have done a bit differently if I were ever to make it again. There’s a little polishing up between the tiers that I intended to do using piped buttercream and piped pink royal icing that I just didn’t get time to finish and I rushed my curlicues as I needed to get a little person into his bath and to bed the night before so they could definitely have been better, but on the whole, pleased with the effort.

Milo’s verdict: “It’s my chocolate cake, I will eat it all up.” He hasn’t by the way and there’s a whole tier in the fridge for whenever we fancy a piece of chocolate cake.

It was only a little while ago that he was 2. Surely.

Milo poured over his favourite page of Big Book of My World by Kali Stileman on National Non-Fiction day yesterday. I’ll be posting a review of this book soon but needless to say, we’re loving it. It’s absolutely gorgeous.

This year has got me thinking as to why. Why do we like non-fiction so much in this house? What does it give us that fiction doesn’t / can’t? Why is it a necessary part of our everyday reading?

“Why?” is also Milo’s most favourite question at the moment. So last night, I did a little experiment. Our journey home from nursery on a Wednesday is a 20 minute walk with Milo in the buggy. We’ve always chatted on the way home, mostly about cars, vans, motorbikes that we see on our journey, about tow bars, indicator lights, spare tyres on the backs of 4x4s, the moon, aeroplanes, the sudden darkness on our journey that’s come with the clocks going back. Sometimes we talk about his day at nursery, but more often than not it’s a conversation about what we see around us on our journey. And the question “why?” which is coming up a lot right now. My experiment… how many “why’s” did Milo ask on our 20 minute journey home.

I took a scrap of paper and a pen to ensure I was completely accurate.

Thirteen “whys” on the journey home. Thirteen questions that I needed to answer, thirteen curious thoughts directly from the brain of my almost three year old. Here are a few of them:

Milo: “Mummy, why’s that motorbike got a tyre on there?”
Me: “That’s the sidecar, the spare tyre is incase the tyres on the sidecar burst or break, then he has an extra one to use instead.”
Milo: “Why?”
Me: “erm…”

Me: “We can’t see the moon tonight can we?”
Milo: “No, he’s hiding. Why’s he hiding?”
Me: “It’s cloudy. The moon is hiding behind the clouds.”
Milo: “Why?”
Me: “Because when it’s cloudy, the clouds cover over the moon and we can’t see it. It’s still there, it’s just behind the clouds.”
Milo: “Why?”
Me: “Why what?”
Milo: “Why are there clouds?”
Me: “Do you mean what are the clouds?”
Milo: “Yes.”

Well, I knew the answer to that because I did geography at school. But I wouldn’t have remembered my geography had it not been for Milo and I sharing this book of his, just the other day. Why is the Sky Blue? (Ladybird Books), a fabulous non-fiction book derived from real questions asked by children. In it is this particular question… What are clouds made of?

And so it goes on… Recently I’ve had questions about diggers and other construction vehicles (we have a building site at the end of our road where we spend a good half an hour every Thursday or Friday looking at everything that’s going on). It’s non-fiction books like this series of Mighty Machines books from QED that not only keep Milo engaged with real-life pictures of the construction vehicles he loves to watch but help me to answer his questions accurately (we have the Diggers one, but I can’t find it. It’s much loved so he’s probably hidden it somewhere where it can’t be tidied!).

One of the other questions I got on our journey home was about our neighbour’s cat.

Milo: “Tosca lives there.”
Me: “She does indeed.”
Milo: “Is she a girl?”
Me: “Yes, she’s a girl cat.”
Milo: “Yes, she is. Does she have boobies?”
Me: “Sort of. She has nipples.”
Milo (much laughter, the word nipple is hilarious to him. I don’t know why): “Why she have nipples?”
Me: “Because girl cats, like mummy’s, like to feed their baby kittens milk and they do this through their nipples.”
Milo: “why?”

We were in the house by this point so I was able to distract with juice and a snack. I guess my point is that whether the question is about a cat’s boobies or what the bucket on the front of a digger is called (a bucket) we have a very curious mind who has thirst for learning about the world and for whom every area of enquiry is equally as interesting. Non-fiction books can deliver some of those answers in ways that fiction can’t. And the non-fiction books on the market now are pretty amazing, inventive, unusual and fascinating so go check them out.

We have a new bedtime favourite. Well, it’s actually been the case for about three weeks now. The Kipper Story Collection by Mick Inkpen (Hodder Children’s Books) and the story that we’re being asked to read again and again at the moment is Kipper’s Birthday. Hmmm… I wonder why that might be! His second favourite story is Kipper’s Toybox and a small fascination with Sock Thing, one of Kipper’s toys.

In Kipper’s Birthday, there is a small mix up with Kipper’s invitation to his birthday party. Kipper asks all his friends to come to his party “tomorrow at 12 o’clock. Don’t be late.” But then fails to pass the invites onto his friends until the next day (his actual birthday) meaning they don’t arrive until the day after his birthday. A bit disappointing for Kipper but at least he has the birthday cake he’s made to eat in the meantime. And it’s this birthday cake that Milo and I decided to bake.

Looks like a giant rock cake doesn’t it? Well, that’s what we chose to go with. I love the description of how Kipper goes about baking his cake.

It’s almost a recipe so after a little read of the book we pretty much decided to follow Kipper’s instructions.

Milo and I haven’t made rock cakes together before. Goodness know why because I absolutely love them. My grandpa used to make a wonderful rock cake and it was always something I’d look forward to whenever I visited my grandparents house. So, let’s get cracking. Here’s the recipe:

100g butter (softened)
225g self-raising flour
2 teaspoons of baking powder
50g of granulated sugar
80g of currants
60g of cherries (we used maraschino cherries)
1 large egg
and about a tablespoon, maybe a bit more, of whole milk

Making rock cakes with a toddler is completely hands-on. There’s nothing that they can’t get stuck into and have a go at doing and because of this Milo pretty much made the whole of this recipe by himself. First, sieve your flour and baking powder into a bowl and add the butter.

Rub with your fingertips (or use your whole hand as Milo likes to do) until you get breadcrumbs.

Add the currants, cherries and sugar and stir well. You don’t have to just have currants and cherries, you could add dried fruit or candied peel as is more traditional with rock cake but we were trying to stick to Kipper’s own recipe.

Beat the milk and egg together and add to the mixture.

We then chose to make a few small rock cakes and one giant one just like in the book. Lump it all together (we didn’t roll it out first like Kipper tried to), pat it into a sort of shape and transfer to a baking tray.

Pop a cherry on the top, sprinkle a little sugar over your cakes (we used demerara) and then bake in a preheated oven at 200 degrees for approximately 20 minutes or until golden brown.

Meanwhile, while your cake is baking, it’s best to get cracking on your party invitations to your Kipper party. Milo chose to invite Moomin, Beru bear, Ollie “the blobby” octopus and also Mr Derek, the anteater. Some painting then…

Time for the cake to come out of the oven. Ours flattened out a bit in the cooking process so isn’t as high as Kipper’s actual cake, but all the same it tasted good. So, so good.

Well, at least I thought so.

Milo was not so impressed by the currants. Loved the cake around them though but got completely fed up with picking out currants (“you could just eat them instead of picking them out” is what I said. Met with disdain and irritation). He tried giving his away to Mr Derek and Beru bear who both enjoyed it muchly.

Milo’s verdict: “I don’t like currants and cherries but I like Kipper cake.”

Oh dear!

I’m a little bit of a fan of J. otto Seibold’s books and have been since discovering them when travelling with Milo’s dad across across the US a long, long time ago (at least 10 – 12 years). I came home with a lot less room in my backpack and a lot more books. And stationery. Loads of Dr. Seuss and a lot of J. otto Seibold’s picture books and stationery which really caught my eye.

I love the vibrant colours, the intricate, quirky and graphic detail of Seibold’s illustrations. We own some of the Mr Lunch books, Penguin Dreams and Olive the Other Reindeer. Rather oddly I’ve not shared these yet with Milo. I don’t know why (hmm… maybe sticky hands on my gorgeous hardback books that have travelled on a plane with me, moved houses several times and are still in perfect condition. Nah, that couldn’t be it).

But, we now have Count Dagmar which I have shared with Milo as you can see above (his face is shiny because he has buttery marmite spaghetti sauce on it).

And we like it. Count Dagmar is vegetarian just like us and he’s busy getting ready for a party, checking and counting that he’s got everything he needs which we do too before a party. And it’s rhyming, which is always fun.

I’m always interested in reading counting books that rhyme, aren’t you? Just to see what the author comes up with for seven. It’s a tricky one, but J. otto doesn’t disappoint…

“Here come the party spirits, thank heaven!
How many ghosties are there?
Seven. Seven playful ghosties!”

There’s plenty to look at and it’s the perfect Halloween read to introduce Milo to all things spooky. There’s everything in there, spiders, ghosts, bats, castles, skeletons and at the very end, candy, which Milo reliably informs me, means sweets! He enjoys the lift the flap reveal element and counting everything that’s underneath the flaps. He particularly likes Count Dagmar’s nose and seems to be under the impression that Count Dagmar is a girl!

We did a little Halloween baking too. Bats and spiders and witches. To be eaten this evening and given out to any trick or treaters that might come our way.

What are you all up to? Are you celebrating Halloween with a little spooky reading?

(Count Dagmar was sent to me by Chronicle Books which was very nice of them, all thoughts and love of J. otto Seibold are completely mine and Milo’s. Might be time to let him share with me the rest of my Seibold library.)

I’ve been in the past and these conferences are fantastic. This year’s topic is “It Doesn’t Have to Rhyme” with a focus on the question”Why does poetry matter?” begging a more fundamental question in “What is poetry?” which will hopefully be explored throughout the day.

Speakers on the day include Morag Styles, Michael Rosen, Jacqueline Wilson, Susan Bassnett and a panel of people involved with the publication and anthologising of poetry. See, sounds great!

Further information can be found here on the University website. Bookings close on the 4th November so quickly, quickly hurry along!