Open when...letters ❤️

As you know my boyfriend, Tom, has just turned 21! I did go out and buy him some presents, but as well as that I wanted to do something really personal. 

I'm just about to start a new job down south and he is going to be doing a PGCE in Lancaster! I know we are both going to miss each other loads so I wanted to give him a present that would remind him of me and that he could use while I'm 300 miles away this year! 

I had seen loads of these open when letter ideas on Pinterest and thought they were perfect. I like the idea of being able to be there for him on paper when he needs me! 

I saw loads online with fancy envelopes with patterns on but tbh my Tom won't care about an envelope with an Aztec pattern, he'll be more interested in what's inside (hopefully)! So that's why I used plain envelopes... I had so much fun drawing on them all :) 

It was great procrastination for exams too (shh...) 

Here's a list of the topics I did and some things that were in them (they all had a little note from me) 

Open when:  

You need cheering up- things to be thankful for etc.  

You can't sleep- a word search, some sleeping tips

You're horny (don't judge me)- I cannot disclose this information

We've had a fight- a little flowchart, a mini chocolate bar

You need motivation- poem

You're jealous-poem, a kiss 

You're ill- 2 ibuprofen, 2 paracetamol, a beechams cold and flu sachet

You're thinking about our future- pictures of gorgeous houses etc.  

You need to know someone loves you- lots of kisses, reasons why I love him

I've just left after visiting- cute coupons to excite him about the next visit (e.g. massage/cuddle/movie night etc.)

You need to have a rant and I'm not available to listen- paper to write down everything that is wrong and get it off his chest

Boy, did these take me ages to make...

D'you like them? 

I hope you do... but what's really more important is that Tom really liked them! In fact he even got a bit emotional but lets not tell him I told you that!

Tom's Swimming Pool Birthday Cake

It was my boyfriend's 21st birthday on Sunday so of course I made him a cake (with our friend Kayleigh who I've mentioned before when I made the Budget Baker's Birthday Jar)! 

We decided to make a swimming pool cake as Tom loves swimming and is captain of our university team. It was loads of fun and he really liked it! 

Ingredients for the sponge: 

250grams butter 
250grams caster sugar 
4 eggs
250grams self raising flour
2tbsp baking powder 
1 tsp vanilla extract

Firstly we mixed together the butter and the sugar until it was lovely and smooth. While I was doing this Kayleigh sifted out the flour into a bowl to remove all of the lumps. I wisked up the eggs (only using a fork) and added them slowly to the butter and sugar. My arm got tired so it curdled a little bit, but that's okay because we just added a little bit of the flour to stop it from getting out of hand! 

Then we added all of the flour and folded it in a figure of 8 (this fills it with air and helps the sponge to rise). We added in the baking powder and vanilla extract. 

Mix, mix, mix. 

The baking powder had so many lumps in it :( After what felt like an hour of mixing we got rid of those stubborn lumps! Phew. We poured the mix into a square/rectangle tin and let it cook on 180degrees for about 35 mins. 

Fast forward 35 mins after some embarrassing dancing round the kitchen with Kayleigh and our sponge was ready to come out! Yay!

While the cake was cooling we made up the buttercream top. Warning: arm workout inevitable. We decided buttercream would give us a better swimming pool effect... you'll see why later. 

Ingredients for the buttercream: 

Icing sugar (a lot) 
Butter 
I tsp vanilla extract 
A lot of blue food colouring 


Mix together the butter, vanilla extract and icing sugar, keep adding icing sugar until it gets to a nice consistency. We left it quite a bit more sloppy than usual because we wanted it to be able to look like water. 

Actually that was a lie... I'm awful I know. I'll tell the truth now. 

We made the buttercream to the perfect consistency but didn't factor in that we were adding food colouring. And to be honest it took a lot more than we expected to make it look blue. For a while it was a horrendous mould colour. Ewww! So after adding quite a bit of the colouring it ended up a lot more runny. But it didn't matter in the end, it looked quite good and tasted really nice. 

For the cake we made a little swimmer man out of royal icing which we just bought ready made (cheater alert!) and for the lane ropes we bought some of those sweetie necklaces! We obviously didn't want to leave the string on the cake so we cut the necklaces in half holding it carefully so the sweets didn't go everywhere... Then we placed it down in a line and pushed in the sweets with a flat knife edge. Then really really carefully I pulled out the string from one end. 

Tip: Cut the string just next to where the knot is or it will pull all the sweets off the cake... trust me I learnt the hard way! 

Oops, I forgot to mention... of course it has a jam layer in the middle. 

Can you tell that there is a bit too much food colouring? It was an accident but it gives the cake such a good 'water' effect! I can't believe how lucky it turned out that we didn't quite have enough icing. And it tasted great so don't worry about doing this!