A Very Moomin Birthday.

It was my birthday on Saturday and I decided to go home to my parents for the weekend. I wasn't expecting a cake but when Ed and I got there on Friday my mum was so excited that she couldn't keep it a secret until Saturday. This is possibly the best cake in the world! It has some of my favourite things on it, moomins, bats and toadstools! (I will be letting Ed eat the bats because I always think that black icing tastes a bit funky).

This is a gluten free victoria sponge with butter cream and home made raspberry jam... or in other words YUM YUM! I did feel sad cutting this lovely cake up but it was worth it because it is delicious and moist. 

Hope you all had a fun weekend and that your Monday was as good as a Monday could be.

Toadstools in Sherwood Forest.

As Autumn is starting to creep in slowly it means that it is a perfect time to go and search for fungus. So here are the toadstools that I managed to snap yesterday in Sherwood Forest. I have tried to identify them using my Mushrooms and Toadstools book and I think I have got some nailed but others I just couldn't identify.

This one seems to be Heterobasidion Annosum. I think the colours of this is really unusual and pretty. 

This one is Scleroderma Citrinum or more well known as the Common Earthball. If I'm right with this it has a black inside and it sometimes mixed with truffles as an adulteration! This is not good news as it is mildly poisonous and can make you have fainting spells and gastric problems. So watch out for dodgy truffle sellers. 

This one is Trametes Versicolor. I think it kinda looks like weird ears.

I think this one could be Hypholoma Fasciculare or more commonly known as Sulphur Tuft. I'm not 100% sure though.

This is a troublesome one to try and identify, I'm still pondering over this one. 

I couldn't identify this one either, but Ed said it looked like little ghosts, which I thought was quite cute. 

I think this one could be Kuehneromyces mutabilis commonly known as the Sheathed Woodtuft.



This one is Dacryomyces Stillatus or more commonly known as Orange Jelly. I think Orange Jelly is a rather forgiving name for this one, it looks absolutely gross!

This little beauty is Piptoporus Betulinus also known as the Birch Bracket or the Birch Polypore. Ed and I thought this one looked like a nose exploding out of the tree. It was a tricky one to identify because apparently it only looks like this when it is young, as it matures it looks more like a shelf fungus.

It was a lot of fun hunting for these in the forest and I spent a good part of yesterday evening trying to identify as many as I could. I must have been concentrating so hard on them that I even dreamt about mushrooms & toadstools! All I know for sure is that I don't think I would ever be brave enough to pick and eat my own mushrooms, there are just so many that you can't eat.