Easy Car Birthday Cake + A Vegan Birthday Lunch

My little boy is now 1 year old!

Lexie loves cars, so Sylvia and I decided to make him a car cake.

Decorated with vegan sandwich cookies (Oreos) for the wheels, barley sugar for the headlights and licorice to line the windows. Pretty cool, no?

It was within my limited cake decoration abilities, looked so cute and tasted even better.

I used this vegan birthday cake recipe (really really good - have since made cupcakes with this recipe too) and divided it between three loaf tins, following the instructions from here.

I'm sure it will be years until Lexie will appreciate the cake via photos, but he definitely loved the taste of it on the day - he ate a whole big piece!

I always find myself paralysed with indecision when deciding what food to make for such occasions. It's the weight on my shoulders of proving vegan food is delicious, etc. I really should get over this! 

Anyway, in the end I made dishes that I could mostly prepare in advance, really my only choice with two littlies!

For snacks, I made a guacamole with corn, tomato and fresh coriander from Wild Morsels by Angela Stafford. I also made a very tasty French onion dip. 

My mum made her usual fantastic vine leaves, always a hit. 

My sister made lovely vegan curry puffs, but I forgot to take a photo.  

I made two pies (with the barley poppy seed crust without the poppy seeds and with spelt flour from Vegan Lunch Box), one with a mushroom, asparagus and bean filling and the other with a lentil vegetable filling (a double lot of the veggie pot pie filling from La Dolce Vegan).

I also made a pasta salad (this was just OK) and a wild rice salad (also from Wild Morsels).

I was somehow organised enough to make cupcakes for the kids to decorate too, which was lots of fun. My partner's sister did some gorgeous fruit skewers for the kids, with fruit cut out in shapes. Wish I'd taken a photo of them!

It was so lovely celebrating the day with family and yummy vegan food!