Just a quick post as i'm flying about a bit at the moment. 

We're all busy cooking for the holidays. Well, not just cooking, but tidying our homes, laying up tables, sourcing table decorations and generally being a lot more occuped than normal. 

But in my house, a little girl has been counting the days to her birthday for about six months. She's lucky — this year it fell between Rosh Hashanah and Yom Kippur, but there's always the chance she could get one or the other. Hopefully not the latter. 

So this picture sums up my week. Between the Rosh Hashanah table flowers and the birthday balloon is my lunch. Most days it's a sandwich, but as i've eaten so much Yomtov rubbish lately — will the honey cake ever end(?!) — I tried to pull together something a bit more healthy.

A bag of precooked freekeh, some halved cherry tomatoes, a tin of smoked tuna and some basil. Topped with just a squeeze of lemon, its the most balanced thing i've eaten in days. On Monday, supper was the remnants of the birthday tea — old fashioned sandwiches and cake plus some crudites to ease my sugar-guilt.

I had to throw out the malteser-flavoured icing as it was too tempting to scoop from its plastic container. The recipe is from the Hummingbird cookbook, if you're interested and yes, the cupcakes — pictured below — were AMAZING. I plonked happy birthday candles in them so we could sing happy birhday to her. The proper cake — she has requested an Emoji cake (sigh) will be baked for her party in a couple of weeks time. Once upon a time I'd have made more than one cake. Too, too busy now.