A very big birthday party.

This weekend is a very important birthday. Is it mine? No. That was a few weeks ago and was nowhere near as exciting as the one I’m talking about.

This weekend is the 50th birthday of Doctor Who, a milestone which will be celebrated around the world. Our family will be doing our part by getting up at a ridiculously early hour to watch the Day of the Doctor anniversary special which will be broadcast around the world on Sunday. Thanks to some pre-existing wibbly wobbly timey wimey stuff, other parts of the world will be celebrating in the very same way at the very same time, but it will be our yesterday.

Thanks to a conversation with Frivolous Monsters recently I decided that I would try to make the event a bit more memorable than just the four of us sitting blearily on the couch with our morning cuppas.

To that end I spent Friday in a creative frenzy, making a huge mess in the kitchen trying to come up with a series of unhealthy and breakfast-inappropriate Doctor Who inspired treats. A quick trawl of the interwebs showed that I am not alone in my intentions so I had a lot of  pictures to inspire me.

What would the Doctor eat if he was coming for breakfast? Well, Jammie Dodgers of course. We don’t have that exact biscuit here but we have a very similar looking one so into the shopping basket they went.

I also found some a packet of small caramelly slices that seemed a much better option than the actual fish fingers they resembled for the fish finger and custard part of the menu. There was no way I was serving actual fish fingers for breakfast. I have to draw the line somewhere… 😉

Of course we had to have Daleks to nibble on, but they aren’t something that come in a packet, so I had to imagine my own. Hmmmm…. A packet of Chocolate Royals for heads and Oreos for bodies seemed perfect so they were added along with some silver sugar balls (edible ball bearings, of course) for decoration. The Chocolate Royals would also be pressed into service for Ood faces and I found some sour strawberry strips to be cut into Ood tentacles. Perfect.

Glueing short stacks of silver ball-studded Oreos together with icing and topping them with appropriately decorated Choccy Royals meant the Daleks turned out quite well. As they had no wheels they became the kind of Dalek I’m sure the Doctor would prefer to face, mostly made of chocolate and unable to escape. Perfect.

When I was rummaging through the cupboards I discovered some forgotten chocolate moulds in the shape of robots. ROBOTS! Some of them could pass for Cybermen so chocolate drops were quickly melted and the moulds filled.

By now I was running out of time to finish, clean up, and hide the evidence before I had to pick the kids up from school… Eeek! I threw the chocolate Cybermen into the freezer to harden and hid the container of finished Daleks and Ood in the fridge under the cauliflower. Totally safe from discovery there of course!

Now I just have to get up before the kids on the day and arrange it all for maximum effect. It shouldn’t be too hard to thrill them, I already told them watching the show involves a compulsory breakfast of real fish fingers and custard…. 😉

A chocolate breakfast.

The perfect place to take this picture was on my kitchen bench, right beside the perfect prop, my very own TARDIS. No, it isn’t full of excitement and adventure, it is just full of tea bags. Still, it puts a smile on my face every time I use it and the grindy wooo wooo noise comes out from the lid. 😀

Good weather for ducks.

We have been having all kinds of weather lately cold, wet, warm, dry…. it’s been all over the place. It hasn’t been too good for drying my washing but it has been good for my plants, and, judging by the activity in the garden and the amount of spiderweb I have walked through in the last few weeks, it has clearly been good weather for those who live outdoors.

Well, nearly everyone who lives outside. We had a few days when the heavy rain never let up, only the strength varied, keeping away the birds who usually arrive for their daily feed. We figured they had found somewhere comfortable and dry to wait it out. Our assumptions were proven wrong when a small group turned up, soaked and hungry…

One look at their bedraggled feathers and it became clear that they had just been hiding in a tree waiting for it to stop, and that no food deliveries were being made to them!

I made the mistake of going out in the rain to put sunflower seeds out on the back verandah for them and this guy didn’t even let me put it down. As I stretched my arm out he jumped onto my wrist and scoffed the handful before any of the others got a chance! I felt so sorry for the poor soggy thing I stayed out in the rain until he was finished. 😀

Wet and hungry…

Maybe plants can read too!

When I started buying seeds and seedlings for the veg garden earlier in the year I decided that I wanted different varieties than the normal things you usually get at the shop. To that end I have collected things like both red and purple carrots, green grape tomatoes, red spring onion and golden beetroot among others.

Ages ago I also planted some purple sprouting broccoli. It has done one thing really well, sprouted.

The plants are thigh-high with beautiful big green leaves. Unfortunately, their sprouty green-ness had gone on for so long I wondered if anyone had told them that they were supposed to do anything else!

The other day I rearranged the tag on their row and they must have finally read it. I was very excited to see that over the next few days they all managed to summon up some of the ‘purple’ and ‘broccoli’ part of their name. Yippee!

If only some of the other colourful things were ready for picking, now that would be an interesting looking dinner plate. 😀

More interesting than the green variety!