13 layer birthday cake -- while on the road!!

When Boy was 5, I made him a five-layer cake. This year he jokingly said he wanted a 13-layer cake.

I'm always up for a challenge.

To add to the difficulty, we are on the road! I don't have a kitchen of our own.

However (a-ha!) I have a friend who has a candy-making workshop. This homeschooling friendship was formed thus: I met her around town, and I mentioned to her at the farmer's market that I'd love it if we could help her in the workshop some time, so she gave us a few days' apprenticeship! And she's been a good friend our whole time here as well.
So for the 13-layer cake, I asked her if she'd make us up a batch of marshmallow fresh-in-the-bowl. I had of course offered to pay for the batch of marshmallows, but she declined in the end, calling it her contribution to the birthday, which was very kind.

Then I bought an armload of cookies. 19 different kinds. I am not a storebought-cookie-buyer, in general. However... boy wanted a 13 layer cake!

Then we stuck them together with the marshmallow. Here are the raspberries, cooking.

Helena is straining the seeds out. Yarrow objects. He thinks he wants the seeds. She has the decades of candy-making experience. She wins. :)

The concrete mixer: to whip the raspberries, sugar, and gelatin into marshmallowy awesomeness, it takes ten minutes or so in this massive industrial mixer. (She makes marshmallows every day, and selsl them, justifying this massive machine, which I understand are not necessarily available to all people!)

Which turns it into fluffy pink wonderful stuff. 

In the past we always had birthday Lego. This kind of served a double-purpose that way. Cake AND birthday activity!

Thirteen layers happened. :) Here are some of them. 

And finally, the candles and the boy and the table and the people! There he is, all 13 years of him. It's cool that he made his own crazy cake, too.

Birthday treasure hunt photolog

We have a tradition of birthday treasure hunts. My parents made them on the ranch where I grew up, and we had to go kilometres and kilometres. Yarrow and I have lived on rather smaller farms, but we still get some pretty good hunts.

This year's hunt had a Marty Robbins song theme for the clues (which kiddo had to sing).  Here he is, heading off to the silver tree in the distance, barefoot and with backpack for collecting treasures. Handy to have a horse on the scene when one is singing cowboy songs, yes?

The second treasure was to be found in the old blue car, and the third attached to the horse trough (second clue to the tune of Maybelline, third one something about horses...)

The cats were interested and helped out, though Clara got distracted by keeping the kitten in line when we went by the house to the old well in the front yard (the clue was, of course, to the tune of Cool, Clear, Water.)

Okay, I admit, the clue to climb the gum tree was to the tune of Waltzing Mathilda, which is not at all a Marty Robbins song. But if you have a gum tree you gotta play Australian, right?

This is him finding the much-requested bouncy balls in the pumpkin patch. By the way, we planted and maintain this pumpkin patch. All these pumpkins are  here because of us! I take extreme joy in picking them and giving them to the horse, who loves them. It is very strange that I never thought of feeding horses vegetables in Canada. I mean, I thought you could feed pigs the veggie leftovers, but I never knew that horses loved it! Why don't we know that in Canada? Please feed your horses veggies. :)

This patch is right outside our caravan. Yarrow has often mentioned that he feels proud and happy that we made that pumpkin patch happen. Me, I am happy to have largely repressed the thistles! After trying and trying and trying to defeat the thistles at our farm in Springbank, it is a very great joy to have actually defeated them here.

Yarrow says that he is saving these for our holiday with Steven in England, where we are planning to cook a lot. :) I got him special olive oils and vinegars and ratatouille and pistou and aubergines. Joy abounds. :)

What's that you have there, Boy? Alazha wants to know. (It was a boule measuring tool, to measure how far away the petanque balls are from the small ball. Something we've kind of needed!)

Ala and I take a break and guard the loot while the boy takes a while with a clue. Just to bug him about being slow finding purple packets in stacks of pallets, I brought him a Cacolate (bought especially for birthdaying) for refreshment.

This is the boy at the location of the last clue, claiming that there is absolutely nothing to be found here. A bit tricky to see in this photo, but it was wrapped in black electrical tape under the table just at the left there. No excuse -- he knew it was under a table and in this building! :) I just did a little too good of a job of making it look like the rest of the workshop I guess. :)