A First Birthday Party

The morning after the birthday we had a party to get ready for!  We had a small tea party for our close family and Godparents which was just the thing and absolutely the people to celebrate with!  I spent the morning baking, Ed heroically took charge of tidying and hoovering, and Mathilda scuttled about looking cute in her birthday dress.

Her crown was a bidgey bodgey experiment which I think turned out fairly successfully!  It's extremely cute but the elastic pushes her ears forward after she's had it on for a bit so it needs regular adjustment to stop her becoming a tiny chubby BFG...

I found some gorgeously Eastery/Springy fabric for her dress - pale yellow with bunnies and tiny coral flowers, with a collar in the same shade of coral.

Mathilda still has a very useful two hour nap after lunch, which meant that although we had to do a slightly weirdly-timed late lunch/early tea type party so that she could be there with us, at least we had two hours birthday-girl free to do all the last minute bits!

We had: egg sandwiches, cheese straws, smoked salmon and cream cheese on rye soda bread, caramelised onion and goats cheese tarts, sausage rolls and fresh pea, mint and chorizo toasts.  I absolutely love cooking for a party; planning the menu, baking and assembling all the different bits, serving everything on all pretty china, and then watching everyone tuck in!

We washed it all down with prosecco and several rounds of tiny cups of tea and followed it up with an enormous carrot cake.  There were three layers of cake sandwiched with a lemony cream cheese icing, then the whole thing was covered with a layer of royal icing.  I made tiny sugar flowers a few nights before and stuck them all round the top of the cake, and had a horribly nerve-racking moment writing 'Happy Birthday Mathilda' across the front, in the least wobbly writing I could manage!

We had a mammoth present session with a very lucky, very spoilt Mathilda who wanted to open everything and then play with each item as it was unwrapped!

It was such a wonderful day and the perfect way to celebrate a fabulous first year!

Mathilda's First Birthday

Oops, what with one thing and another, and about fifty other things, I'm rather behind on my posts!  

For several months now I have been dreading this day, and suddenly and all too soon, it was upon us!  I can't believe that it was a whole year ago we welcomed the gorgeous Mathilda into the world and into our family.  It has been a year of such joy and love, and we are so blessed to have this delicious little creature in our lives!

We were so lucky that her birthday fell on Good Friday as Ed had the day off work and we were able to go on a gorgeous day out together.  We went down to Osterly Park in beautiful spring sunshine and wiffled about together in a birthday-ish sort of way,

In the end it was such a beautiful day we didn't bother going in the house but wandered round the grounds in the sunshine.

She loved looking at the animals and was completely obsessed with the ducks!

Annoyingly I made Mathilda a picnic but ran out of time to make us any lunch, so Mathilda scoffed some birthday sandwiches and we watched on hungrily.

Thus suitably birthday-ed we went home to baking and cooking and general party preparations...