Ian is 10!

My Christmas baby is no longer a baby. He turned 10 on the 25th. This year, we came back from a holiday just 3 days before Christmas and I think age had definately caught up with me as I felt so tired that I could not muster enough energy to bake him a cake. So I had told him that he'll be getting a store-bought one. He's fine with it, just that he specifically asked for a chocolate cake (and had we not eaten enough chocolates in Australia????). Anyway, when I woke on Christmas day, I decided maybe I should bake him cupcakes instead. So I did. And to make my task even easier, I told the kids that they'll get to decorate their own cupcakes. Of course, they were more than happy to do so. It was fun. This was the cupcakes they did. The middle one, which I had to place the candle in (which explaned the hole) was decorated by me. I used white chocolate and dark chocolate to coat the tops and left the decoration to them. This was how the cupcakes looked when put together.

The following day, on the 26th, I had a baking class to attend. It was by the lovely Sharon Wee, who came back to Sg for a holiday. She's currently based in Sydney and runs a home-baking biz there. For this class, we had to make some figurines and also cover a fondant cake. I got to learn how to properly ganache a cake and of course, fondant-cover it. It was a good learning experience. And it also gave me the chance to produce a "proper" cake for Ian. And so, i did up the cake with him in mind. Here's how it turned out. I'm pretty happy with the results, what do u think?

Little penguin figurines...

Here's how the cake looked as a whole.

Another angle.

Just the top.

The penguin trying to "climb" the bow. Wad a cutie. :P

Looking for more food? LOL

I finally did it.

This is not a bake post.... but just to document a little achievement of mine. :)

At the starting point.

Running the marathon had always seemed to be an impossible dream for me. I always wondered how anyone can push one's body limits to complete 42.2km within hours! of course being a freshie marathon runner, I'm not that crazy to want attempt the full marathon. I was only eyeing on the 10km. In fact I had signed up for it last year, but in the end, chickened out because I had not been training at all for the run.


This year however is a different case. I had promised myself at the beginning of the year to run the 10km, come what may. But I nearly could not do so, when I missed the registration deadline and the spots were filled up. My company had it arranged as a corporate event, and they offered to pay for all the runners. Thankfully, I finally was able to sign up when they opened up for more places. Also amongst my siblings, they are all running the full marathon! so u can see, I'm the least athletic amongst them. I decided to pace myself in the practise runs in the months leading up to the race today... but the most I could cover during those practises were max. 3km. Still I wanted to run.... and I did.


I'm glad I did it.