A big roar goes to....

Lion Cake

Unbelievable but true. A whole year has passed. The veggie baby is now a veggie toddler (although walking isn't quite on the horizon just yet).

To celebrate I made a cake. Our Monkey loves lions, so what better to bake than a lion cake?

Sketching a rough

I tried a couple of recipes since I didn't want to find out the night before the big day, that the recipe wasn't working. Because I had never used fondant, I had a play... Let's call it a sketch!

Easy Vanilla Cake

I finally decided on the "Easy Vanilla Cake" recipe found here on the BBC Good Food website. The cake tastes delicious and it nice and fuffy.

Ingredients are:
    •    250g pack unsalted butter, softened, plus extra for greasing
    •    250g golden caster sugar
    •    seeds scraped from 1 vanilla pod or 1 tsp vanilla paste
    •    5 large eggs, cracked into a jug
    •    85g plain flour
    •    100g full-fat Greek yogurt (I used Total)
    •    250g self-raising flour
    •    3 tbsp semi-skimmed milk

Fluffy dough

Method:

Heat oven to 160C/140C fan/gas 3. Grease a round, deep 20cm tin, then line the base and sides with non-stick baking paper.

Using electric beaters or a tabletop mixer, beat the butter, sugar, vanilla and ¼ tsp salt together until pale and fluffy, then pour in the eggs, one at a time, giving the mix a really good beating before adding the next. Add 1 tbsp of the plain flour if the mix starts to look slimy rather than fluffy. Beat in the yogurt.

Mix the flours; then, using a large metal spoon, fold them into the batter, followed by the milk. Spoon the mix into the tin and bake for about 35 minutes or until well risen and golden – a skewer inserted into the middle should come out clean.

Everything went nice and smoothly, I even had the monkey help me put the flour into the mixture. Sadly once transferred into the tin, and lifting off to place into the oven, the bottom of the cheap cake tin came dislodged and plonked onto the floor. Very disappointing. So I had to start from scratch. The second attempt went smoothly without any disasters.

Decorating

Once the cake had cooled down it was time to decorate. Now, I do love making a cake, but decorating it hasn't yet been a big thing for me. Partially because I personally don't want to have a ton of sugar and extra calories in/on my cake. But since this is a 1st Birthday Cake I thought: let's go to town!

decorating the Lion Cake

Ready, set, go! I had drawn a little sketch on how I wanted it to look like, and so I started rolling out the sugar fondant.

Once the yellow and white pieces of fondant were in place, I added chocolate icing for the details of the mane, eyes and mouth area.

Looking more and more like a Lion Cake

Here the final Lion Cake in all its "glory". I suppose a real cake maker would laugh at my child-like cake decoration, but I am proud as punch. Rrrrraaaaaaaarrrrrrrrrrr.

1st birthday cake: Lion Cake

Happy 1st Birthday Veggie Baby!!

Hands on

Busy cooking

It seems we are too busy cooking to update our blog: recipes we have tried, tested and amended and for ever cleaning that patch under the high chair seems to have chewed up a lot of our time. We now have a backlog of photos to post and things we wanted to write about. Well, rather than stagnating, we will just keep posting as and when. If there happens to be some spare time, we will revisit the "to do" folder.

Busy eating

We've been getting a bit more adventurous with our veggie baby cooking. Not only do purees start feeling a little bit boring but it's time to get hands on. Finger foods have always been high on the "yes please" list, and with the monkey clearly wanting to get his hands dirty there is no denying it: Our baby is growing up and wants to start exploring grown up stuff. NB We do not throw food against the wall - he's not got that from us. Just sayin'.

Pancakes

Yesterday I made these lovely pancakes for the monkey. No difference to "grown up" pancake recipes, really. Just leave the refined sugar out. We added a tiny bit of maple syrup so it wasn't too dry. The recipe suggested fruit to go with it, but we didn't have anything more suitable than some pieces of pears. Doesn't look quite as exciting in our photo as it did in Annabel Karmel's cookbook but I guess we don't have a food photographer on standby, so excuse us ;) The veggie baby liked the pancakes but didn't quite eat enough so we ended up making a small portion of baby porridge to supplement.

Yummy pancakes with a drop of maple sirup

Risotto

For dinner it was time to cook again (after lunchtime was a case of feeding the monkey some leftover roasted veggies with pasta). Although the photo clearly isn't doing this recipe justice, it smelled and tasted superb. Oh and did it go down a treat? It sure did. Recipe again from Annabel Karmel's cookbook although we took some liberties with it.

Ingredients are
basmati Rice
tomatos
grated cheese
pumpkin
splash of maple syrup
mixed herbs
teeny bit of salt

I am not keen on going high on sugar, but because it tasted a tad too bland we added herbs, salt and maple syrup.

Pumpkin tomato risotto - WINNER!

That's it, baby. More updates soon.

Lentils all the way

Today we're having lentils. Lentils are great - so versatile and full of protein.

The recipe we used for the monkey was taken from Annabel Karmel's New Complete Baby and Toddler Meal Planner (have a look here).  


We don't want to breach copyright, hence no exact recipe. 
However the ingredients are: onion, celery, vegetable oil, carrot, split red lentil, sweet potato and homemade veggie stock - and it is a quick and easy recipe.

Our veggie baby loves this lovely lentil stew (admittedly we've cooked this before, but we only started our blog now, so we thought we may as well revisit) and kept asking for more - mouth wide open.

Meanwhile we cooked ourselves a nice "Indian red lentil soup" from the 30 Minute Vegan (have a look here). Happy veggies.

Cooked by Jaime, posted by Anna