I’ve been working on a secret project over the past three months. It won’t be finished until August but here it is in progress…

13 weeks ago I went to a big xmas party. To cut a long story short I  had a very large night. LARGE. Advertising large.  The next day I woke up with the worst hangover of my life. A week later I still felt like death and on further investigation discovered I was pregnant…eek! (doctor assures me all is OK).  I have had the same  hangover for 13 weeks. Can you imagine, I’ve been saying to myself “I’m never going to drink again, yes I’ll have fries with that” for 13 weeks?

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All that hangover was so worth it when I saw my new bubba on the screen – dancing around like a disco baby just like his/her big brother did.  I didn’t think I’d be as excited about the second baby but I can proudly report that I’m every bit as clucky, excited and nervous as I was the first time. I can say that this time I will avoid international press coverage that went crazy over my first bubbas  facebook page ” Womb with a view” . Oh bring on that second trimester glow and the nesting hormones that make me craft like crazy!

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Well I’m back after 12 days in Thailand which was WONDERFUL! We hadn’t been on a real holiday since before Oscar was born. Travel times have changed. I used to be able to pack a backpack in under 20 mins with a hangover, sleep on buses, trains and planes and order a beer in 20 languages. This time it took me a full week of packing and organising and I was completely sober for the entire experience.  I won’t even tell you about the 9 hour flight. It was all worth it in the end though… my golden haired boy was adored by everyone we met and loved every minute of the trip.

So I’m full of crafting energy and have almost finished a shaggy blue dog for Oscar. Having had 12 days to think about it I have a list a mile long of projects I want to start but I’m forcing myself to finish all outstanding projects first (well attempting to anyway, that sounds very disciplined but really I’m hopeless at that sort of thing). Hopefully the shaggy dog will but up here tomorrow.

I’ve smiled at blog games from a distance but so far have yet to join in the party. Well here’s my first go at it. Bug and Pop is hosting a game called Eye Spy with a different theme each week. This week it’s love. I thought long and hard about being witty, clever, to put an unexpected twist on the theme. Instead I’ve gone completely predictable. Here is my lovely Oscar who I haven’t blogged about in ages. He was the world’s most famous facebook foetus (Bubba Waring was all over the news because I created a facebok page for him when I was pregnant). Love is that little tummy, those eyes and the cheeky dimples. This photo was taken at about 7am one morning when we went out for coffee and toast together. There’s this little look he gets when he realises that I’m not going to work today, that I’m spending the whole day with him. His little face lights up with this contented… “yep… it’s just  you and me today” expression. Love.

Oscar is fast asleep in the car and snoring like a trooper! I’m trapped parked outside our house waiting for him to wake up with nothing but my phone for entertainment. I’ve been here for 20 minutes. Note to self; keep craft project in car for emergencies!

I remember my mum making a swimming pool cake for my brother from the Women’s Weekly Birthday cake book. It had jelly in the middle and little people floating around in lolly tubes. I dragged the vintage 70s book out and used the same choccie biscuit structure as the swimming pool and just made up the rest.

Ingredients.

• 2 x packets of cake mix with icing mixture included
  (I used White Wings White Chocolate Rasberry Swirl)
• 2 x 250g packets of chocolate finger biscuits
• 2 x 250g packets of cream cheese
• 2-3 tablespoons of cocoa
• blue food colouring
• rubber ducks to decorate
• white mini marshmallows

Instructions.

Get the cream cheese out of the fridge

It needs to come to room temperature for the icing.
You might want to pre-heat the oven as well.

Bake both cakes

Just follow the packet directions and pour into a round 23cm tin. I lowered the temperature of the oven by 10degrees and baked for a little longer than the packet recommended. This helps to stop the cake rising too much – you’ll want a flat top later.

Make Icing

Make icing in two separate batches as you’ll need pretty much equal parts brown and blue coloured icing. Mix according to directions on pack then add 250g of the cream cheese to the icing and beat it for a couple more minutes.

Add 2-3 tablespoons of cocoa to one of the icing batches to make it a chocolatey brown. It can be as dark and rich or as light as you like.

Add blue food colouring, one drop at a time, to the other batch until you have reach a colour strong enough to look fun but not too scary to eat!

Slice the top off

Slice the top off each of the cooled cakes so that you have a flat area to work with.

Assemble cakes

Put one cake down flat on the board or dish you want to serve on. Smooth some of the chocolate icing over the top and place the other cake on top.

Make the tub

Ice all around the edges of the cake leaving the top bare. Next start placing chocolate sticks around the side. My cakes were a little tall so I placed a row of chocolate sticks at the base as well to give them some more height.

Blue icing on top

Smooth the blue icing over the top of the cake being careful not to have it merge too much into the chocolate icing on the sides.Use a knife to create little wave peaks.

Rub-a-dub-dub…

…put the ducks in the tub! Place the duckies around the top then add little marshmallows around the blue icing peaks for bubbles.I got a bit carried away and put some icing down the side, pooling at the bottom to look like water and bubbles had spilled over the side of the tub.

Viola!