Have you eaten enough chocolate yet?  I must admit to not having many family Easter traditions in place here on Planet Penny because as a one parent family when the children were small, they would have Christmas with me and Easter with their other family and an Easter egg Hunt for one is a little boring (and also very fattening!)   But this Easter just happened to coincide with my daughter’s birthday so an excuse for chocolate and champagne!

A request was made  for a very special chocolate cake, as seen on the cover of this month’s Sainsbury’s magazine.

Much agonising from me as I have rather lost my cake baking confidence.  Cake and I cannot safely exist in the same space, one of us has to go, and it’s always the cake.  I’m afraid all the pep talking from my Weight Watchers guru has not brain washed me into portion control and point counting in these circumstances so I find it easier to confine my baking to those occasions when I have several mouths to feed.

It involves a lot of chocolate and cream and eggs and sugar and melting and cooling and more chocolate (and scraping and licking) oh! and raspberries – now they’re  healthy…and in the end there was this…

…which I think worked rather well and was transformed with candles into this…

…and was voted the best chocolate cake ever. 

Higgins had an Easter present too, all the way from Korea and very beautifully packed.

Inside was this…

He wasn’t very grateful.

And went to bed to get over it. He was eventually persuaded to get out of bed when he realised he didn’t have to actually have to go out for a walk  in it…

And even tried a few super hero stunts…

But when Henry the cat (who refused to be Robin) gave him a smack for looking silly he gave up and went back to bed…

It’s a hard life having to be cute all the time…