Today is Carly's birthday.
She is very old.
In an effort to make her happy, I have both opted to write her a birthday post, and make her a birthday cake - mostly because she likes cake, and blog posts are also kinda fun.
Since I'm not one for baking much, I went with a fairly safe recipe that Carly likes.. Shirley's Orange Cake, from The Country Show Cookbook, with slight modification - I ditched the orange and replaced it with a bit of vanilla essence instead.
Ingredients:
125g (4oz) butter (room temperature)
¾ cup caster sugar
2 eggs, beaten
½ cup milk
1¾ cup self-raising flour
2 tablespoons cold water
1 teaspoon vanilla essence
Start by preheating your oven to 180°C (350°F) and grease an 18cm (7in) round cake tin.
Cream your butter and sugar together.
Add eggs and mix.
Or roughly until it looks like this:
Yay. Cake. So far, so good.
Now, on to the icing.
I took this recipe for Vienna Cream icing from the Women's Weekly Children's Birthday Cake Book.
Ingredients:
125g (4oz) butter (room temperature)
1½ cups icing sugar
2 tablespoons milk
Beat the butter until it is almost white, as so:
At this point I opted to colour the mix a nice aqua colour, because aqua is aqua-ish. 4 drops blue, 2 drops green food colouring, and mix!

Add candles, thrust at birthday girl while singing jovially.
Then step back and take cover as cake is devoured.
Happy Birthday Babe! I love you! :)