Oscar's 1st Birthday Roundup

Hard to believe but my baby is 1 today! The past 12 months have been amazing but it's all gone by so quickly. He's going to be starting school before I know it.

To celebrate we had a party on Sunday down at the waterfront at Manly. We thought the weather was going to spoil it but it turned into a gorgeous day.

38 adults, 7 kids, 1 dog and a ton of food. Sounds like a party to me!

Where's Oscar? Nath worked hard to blow up all these balloons but they didn't last long in the wind

Not too sure about the hat!

Yay, cake!

Hmmm, do I like icing?

Fingerprints in the icing

Who cares about presents when there's bark to play with!

Mummy and Oscar looking a little worse for wear

The car's loaded up with presents. Time for a nap

After spending most of the weekend cooking and baking I didn't even get a photo of the food!

We decided to keep it simple and just have a sausage sizzle, potato salad, pasta salad, green salad, bread and cake.

What you didn't see in the photos are the 48 cupcakes I made. This is one of the 3 leftover that we took home:

I used Nigella's basic cupcake recipe which always works for me. You can find the recipe here. I made a test batch a few weeks ago so felt really confident making 4 doz for the party. But this time I used foil cupcake wrappers and they seemed to cook a lot faster than normal. Mine were done in 13 minutes, not the 15-20 Nigella suggests in the recipe.

I also made a very simple buttercream icing and decorated each one with a freckle.

Buttercream Icing

125g soft butter (I always use salted butter)
3 cups icing sugar, sifted
2 ts vanilla extra

Using the paddle attachment in your mixer, beat the butter until smooth. Turn the speed to low and add the icing sugar in one go. Beat until combined. Add the vanilla then turn up the speed and beat for about 3 minutes. The icing will be thick, white and shiny. Yum!

Oscar's cake was a giant cupcake made using the Wilton pan. I bought this probably 8 months ago and always planned to use it for his first birthday. I was a little worried how it would turn out (there are lots of horror stories of it sticking etc online). I used a packet cake mix for this, figuring it would be easier. I had just 1/2 cup mixture left from 2 boxes. The tin was greased and floured well, the cake baked for 45 minutes and after a 10 minute rest, out popped 2 perfect cupcake halves. Success!

All in all it was a wonderful day and totally worth all the hard work. A big thanks to Nath's mum Di for her help babysitting and cooking on Saturday :-)