Happy birthday to us

I made it back from Lake Tahoe just in time to celebrate my 29th birthday with Larry. For the second year in a row he surprised me by making a cake.It was the perfect little celebration. He also treated me to a night out to dinner and to watch the movie Paperheart, which made for a happy evening together.
Then a month later we got to celebrate Larry's birthday. It's funny how as parents, a lot of birthday celebrations are more for the kids than the parents, even if it's their birthday. Creed was SOOOOOO excited to help make Larry a cake.

And he insisted that we have birthday flags up like we had for his birthday, but they needed to be Larry's favorite color, black (which makes for sort of a bleak looking birthday celebration, but we left it up for Halloween). I decided to just make a miniature garland for the chandelier and Creed dutifully stood by me at the sewing machine, handing me one tiny flag at a time.

Then we made a simple card to match.Before we moved from Columbus, Cat made our friend David a chocolate cake with the most amazing brown sugar frosting, and Larry loved it so she walked me through making it. It's called Penuche Icing (I think) and everyone who stopped by to try a piece asked for the recipe so I thought I would share it here.

1 stick of butter, melt then add

1 cup brown sugar, boil over low heat for two minutes while stirring

add 1/4 cup of milk, bring to a boil while stirring

add 1 3/4 to 2 cups of powdered sugar

a pinch of salt

2 drops of vanilla

pour over cake

And Creed decorated the cake all by himself.

And at the end of the evening, we had some surprise birthday well-wishers!