We've had several celebrations in the last month. I thought I'd share some photos from some of them.
The second weekend in November we flew to Minnesota for a surprise birthday party for my in-laws. Noel's parents were born within two days of each other, and they were both turning 70, which is a pretty significant birthday. With the help of an old friend, we tricked them into coming to a restaurant where the three kids and I were waiting to surprise them.
They were very surprised and a great time was had by all.
There's the family all together: Joanne (the family friend who helped coordinate it and managed to keep the secret perfectly), Lynn, Anne, Michael, Sandy, and Noel. In front of the restaurant.
The next day, the weather gave them another surprise birthday present, which was several inches of wet soft snow. My sisters in law immediately got stuck in the driveway while going shoe shopping.
The next weekend, A Verb for Keeping Warm had their store-warming party, a big celebration of their fancy new location in a real retail space. I'm a big fan of Verb, and next weekend I'll be teaching a class there on the physics of spindle spinning.
They had this awesome cake, made to look like a bundle of fiber in their "Thai Iced Tea" colourway.
Then it was time to plan for Thanksgiving. I started by taking out the traditional turkey mold.
I love this mold, but unfortunately I can only justify using it maybe once or twice a year.
I modified my last pumpkin pie turned into cake recipe to make it spicier (it tasted a little bland even to me, which is pretty bland indeed), but I didn't like how the cake came out of the mold. So the next few days were spent on experiments and then truly deconstructing the idea of cake.
But you'll have to wait for the big reveal on the final product, because the day before Thanksgiving is also a holiday in our house; it is Stinky Fish Day. Noel stays home from work and the Stink Fish Fairy (the Fedex guy) brings the special package from my family:
It's a big package of fish and bagels from Zabar's.
A good time was had by all, though not everybody got some fish. (The dogs traditionally get the skin from the whitefish, though, so there was a happy ending for them, too.)
For Thanksgiving dinner we brought the potatoes and the dessert. We re-imagined the potatoes as a trifle, layered with hash browns at the bottom, then purple mashed potatoes, then potato gratin, then white mashed potatoes, then purple again, then a piped layer of mashed potatoes beaten with extra cream to make them pipe better.
The deonstructed deconstructed pumpkin pie turned into layered pumpkin desserts: the bottom layer was a circle of pumpkin cake soaked in ginger syrup, then a ginger-fig filling, then a boiled sugar frosting, then another layer of pumpkin cake, a layer of whipped cream, and a little miniature bundt cake top. It was kind of over the top, but it worked OK. Too bad I was totally stuffed from eating an entire turkey drumstick before we got to that course.
And by popular demand, I made Charlotte's peanut butter cup cookies, all six dozen of which were devoured or squirreled off by the other diners (and since we have two cake's worth of trimmed pumpkin cake bits to eat, this was not a problem).
Of the three things we made, I was most impressed by how fun it was to pipe potatoes.
This week I will make the mincemeat filling for our Christmas pie. We're having friends over and baking a ham (or two). There may be piped potatoes involved.
