Catching up: Jessica's birthday.

Next up was my birthday.

I also got lots of very nice presents, including this one, from Mom and Dad, which was wrapped up nicely by Amazon. I have bought presents wrapped by Amazon before but I had never seen what it looked like, so in case you're wondering, this is how it arrives:


And this is what was inside:


A cookbook with some very nice looking cakes inside, written by a lady who works for NPR's All Things Considered. The first cake I've made from here was for Mark's mum's birthday this past weekend. Mark chose it - a traditional yellow layer cake with dark chocolate frosting, and it was really yummy. She uses whipped cream in her recipe, which I've never done, and it meant it was nice and fluffy.

Here is a series of photos from my big present:








It's a bread maker, which I really wanted to make my regular bagel making even easier. It's great, and I've already made bagels with it, too!

Like I mentioned on Jenny's blog, I had a giant cookie cake (which I assume is the same thing as a pizookie?)


Here's the first loaf of bread I made, on the day after my birthday:


And the next day we also played one of the games I got - a version of Ticket to Ride designed for 2-3 players, based on a map of the Nordic countries.



It's great.