The Birthday Party
It was an exciting day. We were expecting our first dinner guests. We moved into The Pokeaway on Canadian Thanksgiving, but hadn't been able to get it together to have anyone in for a meal. A December birthday party seemed the perfect opportunity to have our in-laws join us. It felt like a celebration in more ways than one. The day before, we had worked on getting rid of the drywall coffee table, and now had room in the living room to enjoy visiting, after the dinner was over.
I pulled out all the stops. (Well, some of it I pulled out of the freezer). Lasagna, ham, fresh bread, Caesar salad, (compliments of my daughter), homemade cake, and ice cream (compliments of my daughter's boyfriend).
Not everything turned out perfect. The bread rose to a certain point and then turned in on itself. I served it anyway. My husband told them it was shaped that way to hold the gravy. When I went to ice the cake, I couldn't get the cocoa to disappear in the icing. It may have been because I was trying to cheat a little and adding cocoa to store-bought vanilla icing. In any case, the cake was freckled with unmixed cocoa. Then when I used my cookie press-icing machine it used up the icing in great globs. I couldn't spell their names, and the letters had to be incorporated into the rest of the icing, lest they wonder why there was only a single letter on the cake. I almost wrecked the the casserole dish I used to cook the ham, because I turned on the wrong burner when I started the tea. Fortunately, my daughter came in and found it crackling with heat, so I was able to rescue the perishing.
Oh, and I realized a bit too late, that I didn't have candles, so we used these fake tea lights. But it was fun watching them try to blow out the candles.
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