It was party time in the M-P household today. Up until now we've had a super, super quiet Christmas, with no visitors and almost no reason to leave the house for the last week. Which has been nice in a lot of ways. But also on occasion a little dull for the youngest member of the family.
Unfortunately we weren't able to get together with the cousins this year and with the way that Christmas day fell, friends have been away and nursery is closed, so Bella has been stuck with just Mummy and Daddy for company for a week now.
Which meant that although I hadn't taken in to account just how sore and tired I would be at this stage of the pregnancy, I was still extremely relieved that I had arranged to have a small party today. Because it was just what we all needed to shift the post Christmas malaise and get us all ready for jumping back to reality next week, with work and nursery etc.
Because I am so uncomfortable, I tried to keep it simple and just made a couple of homemade soups, roasted a chicken for sandwiches, cooked some sausage rolls and made up a plate of cheese and ham. For pudding I intended to bake some stuffed apples with vanilla ice cream but at the last minute decided to accept defeat, and we just had the biscuits that I made last night (Bella felt very cheated to discover that I'd been baking biscuits without her!).
The cupcakes that you see in the picture are a big new venture for us. Because of Bella's severe egg allergy, we have avoided make any kind of cake in the past. But whilst we were food shopping yesterday Bella pointed to one of those lurid pink boxes of cupcake mix and declared that we had to buy some. We explained, as we always do that you need to make it with egg so it was a no go, but Bella insisted that we buy it for her friends to have, even though she knew she couldn't have any. Which of course broke our cold, hard hearts and meant that we finally broke out the egg replacer this morning and baked us some egg free cupcakes.
Egg free cupcakes that my daughter is now eating for dinner. Hmmm.
You know it's a good party when you get to sit on the kitchen floor with your friends and eat a huge Pyrex dish of ginger biscuits and the grown ups don't even notice!
