Day 845 I Love You Baby…

Thank you so much for all your prayers. It is happening early in the morning :-)

Day 844 The Day Before Due Date

The mauve cake was a success! Yay! This is going to be a short post. My back is aching so much. Off to bed now. And to the hospital tomorrow. Prayers are appreciated :-) Thank you!

Day 834 The Tale of a Purple Turned Mauve Birthday Cake

I sooo miss English Icing Sugar. There is nothing like the fine powder flying around you when opening the box. Oh, sweet times of baking in England! I must find a place that sells it in Budapest. This morning I woke up with a pre-giving-birth-energy-bomb in me, determined to blow a delicious cake on a birthday table tomorrow. I spent some time on my favourite food site: BBC Food and found the recipe of a moist lemon cake covered with buttercream and decorated with white icing daisies. I wrote a list and literally rushed over to Tesco’s with my husband to buy whatever we needed. I know from experience powdered sugar is no use when icing is at stake, so I decided to make my own. I was so determined to make the finest I could, but after a while I had to consider the not so happy ending option of burning down the coffee grinder I got as a pre-Christmas gift from the ‘One&Only’ :-)

First time in my life I made real lemon curd and sugar syrup. I remember Izzy making lemon curd 2 Christmases’ ago and I wanted to try it since then. What a joy!!! The cake recipe said over two hours cooking time. Great I thought and got started. But I realised halfway through, I missed a very important piece of information, preparation time: overnight. I spent about 6 hours making the cake 2 days before giving birth. I also had a major hiccup, as there is no English double cream in Hungary and the cream I got started to drip on the sides. After some panic I decided to cover the whole cake with purple buttercream, the favourite colour of the birthday girl. But no matter how hard I tried with the purple food colouring, it came out mauve. And now after 6 hours hard labour I have a mauve lemon cake with dripping cream inside in the fridge. I hope it will set by tomorrow.

P.s. I don’t think I should be doing such ambitious cooking projects until next year. I do have a back ache now. And the O&O has threatened me with blocking the kitchen door, if I don’t look after myself. I LOVE BEING MARRIED!!!

Day 791-833 I’m Back or the Joy of Time Out whilst Expecting :-)

Most likely the longest time, I haven’t posted on the blog. I talked to my husband yesterday and told him, I’ve found it ‘hard’ (I meant did not feel like) writing not only the blog, but e-mails either in the last one and a half months. I just didn’t want to call people back and tried to detach myself from all sorts of expectations. It was our time: the baby’s we are expecting, my husband’s and mine and nobody else’s. I have e-mails and messages in my inbox waiting to be answered and I did answer them all on my own way by thinking about the people, who written to me.

Marriage changes things. It is a new adventure, where the husband and the wife both need time for each other and themselves to try to bring the most out of their new life together. That meant to me to cut off myself from the expectations of the world. Of course, I have been accused of forgetting about my friends, but as my brother put it many years ago: for those whom we are really important are patiently waiting until we are ready to give them as much attention as we can again, once we have done everything we could to embrace our new situation in our relationship.  I quite like that!

 I am so glad for that intimate time and shutting out the world from these last few weeks of expecting. Baby is due on Monday, 3 days to go, but surely will arrive by Wednesday due to the maternity diabetes. It is nice to know that very soon, we are going to hold him in our arms :-)

Lots have been happening, since I last written. We’ve spent countless days in mixed anxiety and joy in offices trying to find out about maternity leave and finally registered our business: Vondores in Hungary. My husband has been awesome supporting me throughout the whole process.

I had gourmet cravings in the past few weeks: Julia Child’s Boeuf a la Bourguignonne, South African Bobotie, traditional Hungarian Cherry Strudel, Pumpkin Pie, Jewish Flodni and all sorts. I spent many joyful hours in the kitchen, enjoying every minute of creating these delicious dishes.

Carbo-hydrate diet is working very well, I’ve been praised by the diabetologist and other health workers for my dedication. That is true if I start something I can be very determined to achieve the best result I can.

Christmas:  made beaded Christmas tree decorations, customised Santa pack for my little niece and nephew, which had a strange time at the Hungarian Post (not finding the parcel, finding the parcel, losing the parcel again and after tracking the whole process on the 6^th December the kids happily called telling us, they’ve eaten half of the chocolate they found in them already :-)).

And the knitted baby blanket is ready. It looks really lovely J Photo will follow soon!

Thank you for all you, who carry on reading this blog, after my time out!