Our twin birthday girls

Both Mini-1 and Mini-2 have twins.  I may have mentioned that before.  Or not.  But I feel that I have, hmmm... Anyway, these other children aren't technically our twins, you understand, but rather children born to different mothers on the same day in the same ward of the same hospital with whom we are good friends.

So anyway, to cut what could be an unnecessarily long story short, we were going to see Mini-1's twin on their actual birthday (which always falls within the Christmas school holidays, boo hiss) for a playdate at our place - woo hoo!!!  

And so to the cake, of course.  Again, Mini-1 was particular in her desires and still declared green to be her favourite colour (that'll be 3 years now, gosh), whereas her twin said pink and white.  I had bought a number 8 shaped cake maker and fully intended to use that somehow.  Well, it was going to be 2 and a half years until I'd next get the chance, wasn't it?!

It looked good on the pack, right?

 But it was quite tricky to assemble.  The batter was tinted pink, as per the twin's request.

Oooh, it worked!!  But it proved quite tricky to take off the backing sheet, so I didn't dare try to slice and fill it with jam.  I figured that the kids would eat it regardless, and not be too bothered about the lack of a middle layer/filling.

We bought 5 bags of Smarties in order to have enough to make the stripes I wanted across the top of the cake.  You would think that nearly 3/4 of a kilogram of coloured choc sweeties would be plenty, right?  Wrong.  After the girls separated out all the colours, there were hardly any orange ones and it didn't look like there were going to be enough to do the lines really close together - as I had planned.  I had no intention of going out and buying more Smarties (because I knew we'd need to eat all the leftovers, and I really, really prefer M&M's) so had to re-think the spacing between the lines.

Et voila, we see the final result!  As it happened, I could probably have placed the lines a little closer together (and perhaps, if you're being a touch unkind, a little straighter, but who's checking with a ruler?) because there were a fair few leftovers.  But not really that many in the right colours.

The girls were tremendously impressed, as 8 year olds faced with cake and candy are wont to be.  

Here we see them blowing out the candles together.

 Then posing separately for the cutting - happy birthday gorgeous girls!!!