Birthday Weekend!

My nieces birthdays' are on April 13th and April 17th, so every year we have a nice family gathering on the weekend before (or after).  This year it was after, and, even though there was snow on the ground, and a chill in the air, we had a great time!

Mom and dad stayed with me, since my sister's in-laws stayed with her.  It gets really cozy in my one bedroom, but, as always, it was great to see them, and I enjoyed the time we got "to ourselves".

Our main day of "play" was Saturday, and it was a full day!  I ended up baking TWO cakes...since there would be TEN of us at the evening celebration, so spent most of Friday night and Saturday morning doing just that. 

I baked our "usual" key lime cake, but ran out of ingredients, so ended up improvising an orange dreamsicle cake for the second.  I found that it was really EASY to adapt the recipe, so may have a post soon about all the possible variations...chocolate raspberry (mom's suggestion)...almond coconut...peanut butter chocolate...SOOOOO many possibilities!!!

Here's the recipe (again...I think I've included it in about FOUR different blog posts...!).  Thanks again to Kaye Frickhoeffer for posting it on allrecipes.com:
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Key Lime Cake II

Yields: 10-12 servings

Ingredients

1	(18.25 oz.) package lemon cake mix
1	(3 oz.) package instant lemon pudding mix
¾	cup water
½	cup vegetable oil
4	eggs
5	T. key lime juice
1½	cups confectioners' sugar
3	T. key lime juice

Directions

Preheat oven to 350 degrees. Lightly grease one 9×13-inch cake pan or one 10-inch bundt pan.

In a large bowl stir together lemon cake mix, lemon instant pudding, water, oil, eggs, and 5 T. key lime juice, mixing well. Pour batter into prepared pan.

Bake at 350 degrees for 45 minutes. Pour key lime glaze over cake while still warm.

TO MAKE GLAZE: Mix together the confectioners’ sugar and 3 T. key lime juice (or more if necessary). Spoon glaze over warm cake.

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After baking the cakes, and heading to Robin and Dave's we ate lunch, then headed out for some shopping.  Barnes and Noble is ALWAYS a successful stop, and I found some excellent travel guides for a few places we'll be visiting in Italy in July, and the "Macaroni And Cheese" cookbook...80 variations on the CLASSIC recipe.  Can't wait to try ALMOST all of them (I'm skipping the ones with seafood in them!).

After Barnes and Noble, we headed over to Bachmann's, and it was LOVELY to see green plants, and flowers, and other garden-y things.  I found a BEAUTIFUL orchid from South America, and was DELIGHTED that it requires "low to filtered medium" light.  I can SOOOOO do that in my townhouse!

After shopping, we went back to the house, and started getting ready for the birthday dinner.  We prepped salads, decorated cakes, got the grill ready (hamburgers...yum!), and had a great time!  Dinner was amazing!  The cakes were a hit!  It was a fun evening!!

 

 

 

 

 

 

When we came back to the house we showed mom and dad the photos from Hawaii (only about 300 of the 2,500 that we took!), then went to bed.

They got up and around on Sunday, headed back to Iowa, and I spent the rest of the day putzing around the house, grocery shopping, doing laundry, and bracing for the week ahead!

Here's hoping YOU were able to spend AWESOME time with family recently too!!!