Babah's birthday mini party

Babah with his "imperfect but home made with love" cake

It's late, I know! And there are so many 'outstanding' entries waiting to be published as well. Ah! there is no dateline whatsoever right?

Today's entry is about Babah's party held on the night of 24 November 2006. It was a spontaneous plan on Thursday, a day before the party. We knew Auntie De and family were going to London over the weekend. I thought they could stopover for dinner and celebrate Babah's birthday altogether. Coventry is on the way, anyway.

Babah was ecstatic with the idea and even more excited when Auntie De and family agreed to come over.

Baking is a BIG event for Sarah. It has always been a 'joy' baking with Sarah. Be it a simple chocolate chips cookies recipe or Babah's elaborate birthday cake. If I told Sarah that we were going to bake a cake, she would get very excited. And started to drag her activity red table and her little red chair to the kitchen.

She would wait impatiently for me to prepare the ingredients. Most of the times, she assembled the hand mixer herself!


I have to be honest that I have almost never baked a perfect cake. I can get all the theories right, but the cakes would either be too dry, too soggy or even flopped in the middle. Oh yes, once I burnt a loaf of cake but the inside was still raw! Baking is just not my thing.

This is no exception, I'm afraid. I don't think I could hide the uneven cake and porous filling, even if I had a palette knife. The best I could do was to mask the scraggy sides with chocolate fingers.

After the lengthy process of baking with Sarah, we made another daring attempt on preparing pudding buih diraja.

So there was another series of whizzing by Sarah. She was only happy to help me with another nearly disastrous secret recipe.


What next? I was not trying to impress anybody, but there's nothing wrong at being adventurous, right? My Wah (grandma) makes the most delicious ayam golek (equivalent to ayam percik) in the world. She has always passed on to us her recipe - verbally, and I have never attempted to even remember. Because I have never thought that I was really going to make it myself. Let alone preparing for a number of people.

I don't think I failed that night, but I can never compare my ayam percik to my Wah's authentic special ayam golek roasted on real charcoal.

Together with Sarah, we also prepared simple seafood fried kuey teow, tauhu sumbat with its dipping chilli sauce, some salads and rice to go with the chicken. Of course there were the birthday cake and puding buih diraja for desserts. Babah bought a couple of flavoured sparkling drinks for the special occasion too.

This year, Sarah and Amar 'decorated' Babah's birthday card with lots of colourful 'smiley faces'. It was so much more meaningful with their own 'personal' messages for Babah.

While waiting for Babah to come home from work, Sarah helped to tidy up her toys and later joined Amar to watch a movie, 'Ants' on the computer. Later, both had a bath and wore baju kurung and baju melayu.

Babah was genuinely happy when he arrived from work that night. It was a rare occasion that we could sit together as one family on his birthday. For the past three years, his birthday has always fall on an oncall day. So, it was a bonus really this year when we had the chance to celebrate together on his actual birthday plus the presence of Auntie De's family really has livened up the ceremony.

Happy birthday once again to Babah. We hope that you will lead a happy life and continue to strive to achieve your dream (to become a better doctor, that is!)

After our three course meal, we successfully persuaded Auntie De and family to sleep over the night at our house. It was already late, cold and raining. We were so pleased to see Uncle De carrying all their bags into the house. It was not easy to get them to stay over, you know!