this weekend, we celebrated my mum's sixtieth. her actual birthday was last week, but we had the party saturday night - it was a lot of fun. i made the cake myself - i called it a 'cherry ripe' cake, ie coconut, chocolate and cherries - my mum loves bounty and cherry ripe. when i was a kid and my brothers or dad would take orders for treats from the milk bar, mum used to always ask for cherry ripes, and i thought she was crazy. my theory back then was 'bigger is better', so i never understood why, given the run of the local corner shop, mum would always pick the skinniest of all the chocolate bars (i always went for picnic bars, funny feet or sunny boys). now that i'm older, i finally get it... anyway, despite early stressing, the cake turned out quite alright. it was a square coconut layer cake, sandwiched with chocolate icing and pitted black cherries; chocolate poco sticks stood all the way around the cake, and the top was shiny with dark chocolate ganache, with fresh cherries with the stalks still in round the edges and in a little pyramid in the middle. my nephew took one look at the cake and said it looked like 'a cherry temple'. my mum loved it! (yay!)
last week, i had some headshots taken for penguin. a mate of mine, scott, is a photographer (conveniently, his partner yuki is a make-up artist), so we went to their place after work on thursday. i love the pictures, even though i generally quite dislike being photographed - scott did a great job! out of the near one hundred and fifty shots (thank god for digital cameras), i picked four i really like. one of them will be staring out of a book sleeve next year sometime. surreal!