My lovely son was born on Friday the 13th of January and like every child, he loves his birthday parties, mostly because of the presents – you see, he’s very materialistic 🙂 So usually we have a cake and presents from us on actual day and as it usually school day we go to cinema and have lovely meal before.

Then, there have to be party with his friends and school mates. This year we had skiing party at Chatham, which was lovely as it was sunny day – finally, so fed up with this endless rain. We would love to go skiing holiday, my last one was before we had children, at Finland and it was brilliant, but it’s bloody expensive and can’t really afford it at the moment.

Then we needed party with family, so I came up with the idea of the family cinema party. It ended up as winter birthday party and there are 6 of us in our family with birthdays from December to February. I had great plans to choose the films,  I had vintage Coke bottles with colourful paper straws, proper homemade popcorn, cupcakes and pick and mix sweets. I had brilliant ideas for great photo-shoot. I had lovely bunting up, but I managed to take only few lousy photos, because I was so busy to serve the food and organise everything, so finally, when I got around to take some photos it was dark and the momentum was gone.

So my question is , how you all wonderful bloggers manage to take those fantastic pictures of your parties and everything looks so perfect? Makes me feel absolute failure.

Look at this picture from http://www.abeautifulmess.com/

My parties never look on photos like this, even when they feel like this.

Examples of our party and only photos I actually managed to take:

So where the bunting, Coke bottles and pop corn?

Anyway I will add recipe for muffins, mu daughter made. They fruity and moist. We made them heart shape, as it was Valentines and covered them with icing but you can skip the icing and they taste as lovely.

 Berry and Cinnamon muffins

 115 g plain flour

1 tbsp. baking powder

salt

65 g light brown sugar ( we used light muscavado sugar)

1 egg

175ml milk

45 ml vegetable oil

1 -2 tbsp. cinnamon

115g  frozen berries ( we used mixture of rasberries, blackberries, redcurrants and black currants)

Mix all ingridients but berries with electric mixer, but as we had power cut, we used wooden spoon and hand power. Mix carefully the berries in, not to ahrd as this will break berries and fill greased muffin cases with mixture. It makes about 8  muffins. Bake at Gas  Mark 5/ 190C.

Let the muffins cool and you can decorate them with icing, We used 1 egg white, 230 g icing sugar, bit lemon juice and glycerine.

But they are lovely without icing as well, very moist and melting in your mouth.

Anyway they cheered me up despite my rubbish photos.

Happy late Valentines everyone! My husband bought me those.

 … an listen U2-Ordinary Love.