one year, for our daughter’s birthday in march, when it wasn’t warm enough to be outside, we brought the garden inside by decorating the house with greenery and flowers. we filled baskets of all sorts of shapes and sizes with little pots of yellow-centred blue primulas bought from the market, and added some creamy-white and pink show-stoppers for extra impact.
we transformed a simple homemade victoria sponge into an elegant birthday cake with lashings of buttercream icing finished with garden leaves and crowned with pale pink roses. every child had a kraft box to take their cupcakes home, a little bag of colourful cupcake cases and a hand-tied mini-bouquet of flowers – each with a sprig of jasmine to smell lovely.
we made cupcakes in advance, and the children decorated them with coloured icing, topped with an assortment of sprinkles. we brought our higgledy-piggeldy array of vintage flower china down from the attic, attached names to straws so the children knew where to sit, and piled up triangles and rectangles of crustless sandwiches onto cake stands.
