Birthday cake with jasmine green tea

Location: At home in Stratford-upon-Avon
Date: 12 July 2009
Details: Slice of birthday cake with strawberries, with jasmine green tea

Notes:

My dad's birthday is 11 July - what to give the man who has everything he needs and plenty he doesn't? A homemade birthday cake! This particular cuppa and cake moment was enjoyed the day after his birthday - adding strawberries turns the leftover cake slice into something between a cream tea and a dessert.

The cake itself is a simple two-layer Victoria sponge filled with buttercream and blackberry jam (made by my mother) and decorated with fondant icing.

Why the clock decoration? Dad is something of a whizz at mending and restoring Atmos clocks - a very expensive near-perpetual motion precision clock which works by using changes in atmospheric pressure to expand/contract bellows and drive the mechanism. They're made by Jaegar Le Coulture in Switzerland and only a handful of people in the UK are able to mend them correctly.

An added bonus of the clock design decoration is that our family method of measuring out slices of circular food (cake, pie, cheeses etc) is to state how many minutes you'd like. Is there a normal way to do this? What does everyone else do? Degrees is too complicated - minutes is easy, and even easier when the foodstuff actually has minutes marked on it!

Despite being stuffed with a celebratory dinner, Dad and guests on his birthday evening still managed to scoff a slice of the cake with a cuppa to round off their evening. I swiped two leftover slices and enjoyed it with the fresh fruit the following day.