birthday baking bonanza

Four birthdays in my family fall between the end of April and middle of May so a lot of cakes have been baked and consumed around here recently. My sugar intake became so severe at one point that I developed an ulcer which threatened to take over half of the inside of my mouth. Guess what... I carried on eating cake. Sure, it made the ulcer angry, but damn it I love cake. Haha.

Instead of getting in a flap trying to blog each cake separately I thought I'd round them up in one post this year. Sit back and enjoy.

First up is my sister in law's birthday carrot bundt cake. I used the Hummingbird Bakery's carrot layer cake recipe from their first book which I've baked a few times before (here and here) and it's always a winner. I particularly like it in bundt form. Somehow carrot cake is more pleasing served as a big slab than in towering layers.

Next up is my brother's cake. He's the last birthday in our birthday run but we celebrated it a couple of weeks early as he couldn't get home for his actual birthday. It worked in his favour as he got to celebrate twice like the Queen.

He's a big fan of sticky toffee pudding and caramel flavours so I adapted the Hummingbird Bakery's sticky toffee pudding cupcake recipe into a cake. I've baked the cupcakes a couple of times before with great success yet somehome they've never been featured on the blog properly (wait, they're here). I doubled the ingredient quantities to create a triple layer cake but ended up only using two layers as it would have been ridiculously huge with three. This was a heavy but very tasty cake. I think it tasted even better on the second day.

Next up is my eldest brother's cake. He requested a lemon drizzle cake this year and who could say no to such a classic.

I used my favourite all-in-one Mary Berry recipe which has never failed me. We ate the cake with meringues, cream, strawberries and raspberries. Needless to say it was a delicious combination.

And lastly we have my youngest nephew's 3D Tractor Ted cake. I wasn't sure how well this would turn out but I think it looked pretty cool complete with laminated birthday banner and nephew. I can't take all the credit for this one though as my mum did all the modelling, I just provided the sponge cake for construction.

Not pictured is a plain traybake covered in chocolate icing and crushed Cadbury flake (to be a field for the tractor) and a big trifle. I had given up on photographing things by this point.

That's me up to date with all my baking. Now I need to catch up with everything else. I have a newly sewn dress, another finished knitting project and some charity shop purchases to share as well. What has everyone else been baking/making/doing this month?