The eldest had a couple of friends over tonight for a birthday dinner - a backwards meal. He wanted cake for main course (a meat cake), and pizza for dessert (chocolate pizza).

It's rarely straighforward for his birthday meals (last year was a teeny-tiny party with miniature everything), but this one posed a real challenge. The only meat cakes I could find on the interwebs were made of solid slabs of meatloaf - not very appetising - so I made a dense, round lasagna in a torte tin. I added egg to the cheesy bechamel and used fresh lasagna sheets to layer and wrap it, and it all stuck together pretty well. Once it was baked and turned out, I "iced" it with mashed potato. Bacon salt sprinkles and BBQ sauce writing finished it off.

The boys were bemused, then amused, then wolfed it down.

The chocolate pizza (demolished too quickly for the gathering of photographic evidence) was made from a basic pizza dough flavoured with cocoa and extra honey, baked with mini marshmallows and white choc-bits, and then drizzled with a milk chocolate ganache once it was out of the oven. Another made-up recipe that worked. Thank goodness.

Happy birthday sweetheart. All six-foot-three-and-the-rest-inches of you.