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Instant party: Take a sip of this fruit-filled cocktail – delicious paired with a cheesy toast snack – and imagine kicking back on a sunny Greek island

It was an odd Saturday evening and sticky toffee pudding was on my mind. It's by far my favourite dessert of all time and whenever I see it on a menu, I must order it. The ooey-gooey quality of the moist date pudding soaked in a to-die-for warm toffee sauce...Yum!

Perhaps the best way to coax this baby out of an obviously too-comfortable womb would be to invite it to a birthday party, complete with a freshly made cake. Even if my plan to entice this baby to come out and join us didn’t work, at least the rest of us fully gestated people could enjoy a nice dessert while impatiently waiting for my labour to begin. I chose the Carrot Cake with Fluffy White-Chocolate Icing recipe for baby’s birthday cake. Plus, I had been promising my sister-in-law/housemate/student to make it for months now. Carrot cake is her absolute favourite cake in the world.

This is a recipe by Chef Kyle Christofferson, winner of the 2011 So You Think You Can Cook fiddlehead competition.

Instant party: Vancouver's Shangri-La Hotel concocted this sexy and sweet-tart summer cocktail just for us