An early 3rd birthday party for Thomas. We rarely get to celebrate birthdays as a family now that we live so far away so this seemed like the perfect opportunity to make the most of us all being together.

Emma (my brother Ben’s fiancee) and I decided to go all out and make a train cake from the infamous Australian Women’s Weekly Birthday Cake book – the original 30 year old version that I used to look through as a child. Women’s Weekly has released a more recent version and, while very good, it has nothing on the original. Emma and I had so much fun putting the whole thing together and Thomas even helped with the baking and, of course, licking the beaters.

I even made some sausage rolls for the event but I forgot to take a photo of them. For readers of this blog who are not familiar with the sausage roll, it’s basically sausage meat wrapped in puff pastry and is an Aussie staple. Right up there with meat pies and vegemite. The ones I made had sage in them and were delicious. Here’s the recipe I used and this is what they looked like. Delicious!

And here’s the finished cake. Pretty impressive huh? It took a lot of time and effort, and looked like this for about 5 minutes, but I think it was worth it.

And what’s a cake without a picture of the birthday boy blowing out his candles? 

The celebrations actually continued all month and well into the week after we returned home when we celebrated again on his actual birthday – and when Thomas emphatically declared that it was “the best birthday ever!”