Christening and Cake.

[curiouswombat]

My niece's baby, Edith, was christened/baptised during our church service this morning. Lizzy, the niece, asked if I would make a centre-piece cake for the celebratory lunch to be held in the church hall (everyone welcome, family, friends, all the rest of the congregation...)

She left me carte-blanche about type of cake and design. This was the finished cake, in my kitchen, before it went down to church.

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Lizzy was really happy with it - she said it was the perfect design for Edie. Inside there was a lemon and vanilla chequerboard sponge cake, sandwiched together with buttercream and lemon curd.

I have some lovely pictures of the baby as well, but as I have them set to friends only on LJ, and don't usually put family pics on Flickr, I can't post them here. But if you are also a friend on LJ you will find them here. I would be more likely to make DW my preferred site if it had a way of posting pictures directly.

And I now have a new title - my sister's brother-in-law (who I have known for many years) suggested that I should be known as The Dowager Aunt as he thought it had a better ring to it that Great-Aunt!

Comments

[ysilme]

That cake is really terriffic, and sounds so yummy! Your tale of the baptism/christening sounds lovey, too, just a wonderful family event, with lovely pics of you all.
(What is the difference in usage of the terms baptism vs. christening, by the way?)
Congtrats to your new title, too, it's the coolest. XD Are you going to get an accordingly impressive hat for that as well? *g*

The Swedes have a great way of naming their relatives, and I kind of wish somebody would call me by the Swedish term for great aunt one day. *g* The basic terms are mor, far, bror and syster for mother, father, brother and sister. A grandfather is either a farfar or a morfar, depending on the side - father's father or mother's father, and a grandmother likewise is a mormor or farmor. Accordingly, an uncle on your father's side would be your farbror, and a sister your faster (far-syster), and on your mother's side they'd be morbror and moster, meaning I'm the moster of my nieces and nephew. But for any of their children I'm going to be a gammelmoster; gammel means old - and in German that's even funnier as "gammel" is a root word for rotten, making this a rather funny term in German (or not, depending on your humour).
The terms for nieces and nephews are equally simple but less fun: son and dotter (daughter) will be combined to systerson and brorsdotter, or systerdotter and brorson.

[curiouswombat]

It was a really nice day.

I put both names as I wasn't sure whether 'christening' meant something to everyone. Baptism is the technically correct name, it is what the minister always refers to the service as, but christening is the word most people actually use for infant baptism. The word itself looks as if it is quite old, if you see what I mean.

I do feel as if I need a suitably impressive hat to be the Dowager Aunt :)

I always think Scandinavian languages are suitably logical, having different names for relatives of your father to your mother makes sense - whereas all we get are numerals and greats. For example, the lady we all called Aunty Phillis was, technically, my daughter's first cousin twice removed! She was the daughter of my grandfather's sister.

[kaishin108]

That cake looks so scrumptious! The inside sounds tasty and pretty, yum.

I love your new title! :)

[curiouswombat]

Thank you. Fortunately it tasted good, too - the lemon/buttercream combo seemed to be a hit.

I know -'The Dowager Aunt' sounds most impressive!

[cmcmck]

Does sound good!

[curiouswombat]

I was really pleased with the cake - it came out the way i saw it in my head, if you see what I mean.

The day was lovely - baby Edie is just over 5 months old, and a lovely mixture of bright and alert and placid - so fun, but few tantrums.

She comes to church regularly, so neither surroundings nor minister were strange to her, so whilst Revd. Dawn was blessing her with water from the font, Edie was twisting round to try to get her hand in the font, as well.

And when, later, she was sitting on my granddaughter's knee she realised she could reach the edge of the paper tablecloth... luckily we had cleared our table or she might have been the youngest person to attempt the trick where you pull out the cloth and leave the crockery, as she had herself wrapped in the tablecloth in about 30 seconds!

[dalmeny]

Mmm, buttercream and lemon curd.

I should do some baking.

[curiouswombat]

I love having something to bake for - as there are only two of us at home we tend to eat too much cake if I bake just for us!