Happy Birthday Scott!

Scotty just turned the big 3-5.

We celebrated in style while his folks were visiting.

Grandpa Dave did a great job keeping Henry entertained while Grandma Phyllis and I cooked up a storm.  For dinner we made some of Scotty's favorites: pot roast, mashed potatoes, asparagus, and a savory brie en croute.  Mmmm!

Yes, we used ALL of those baking tins...

to make an ELEVEN layer cake.  This thing was a hot mess.  We had to perform bamboo skewer triage just to hold all the layers together.  (I'm pretty sure the ooey gooey fudge sauce was too warm to hold anything together.)  (Don't worry, I thoroughly washed my hands before sticking them all over the cake.)

By the time we were done putting on all the frosting the cake kind of looked like it had leprosy  :$
Fortunately the deliciousness was equal to the messiness (i.e., it was so good we ate the whole 11 layer tower in less than 48 hours).

You can find the recipe here.  I heart Bakerella.
BTW, Bakerella says this is a 14 layer cake... I'm not sure how she pulled that off as there seemed to be just barely enough batter and frosting for 11 layers.  If you feel brave enough to tackle this recipe let me know how many layers you were able to make b/c I still can't figure out how Bakerella got 14.  Maybe she's a baking wizard or something.  More likely:  We made a measuring mistake somewhere along the way.  Oh well, we still ended up with a yummy cake.

The next day I surprised Scotty with a new bike and bike racks on our car.

I love watching people unwrap gifts.  However, I wasn't sure how I was going to be able to easily gift wrap a bike.  I wanted to do something fun rather than just hand him the bike and say, ta-dah!   So I set the bike up in our storage room downstairs, tied one end of a 500 foot ball of twine to the bike, and wound almost all 500 feet of twine ALL OVER the house.  I felt like a giant twine-web spinning spider.  Scott came home from work to find the other end of the twine, some gloves (FYI, twine is ROUGH on your hands), and a note that said, 'follow me and all of your wildest dreams will come true'.  It took him almost 10 minutes to unravel my web.  Good times.  Good times indeed.

On Scott's actual birthday we went out to eat at a great local restaurant called Praha.  It's owned by a Czech chef who was trained in Austria.  So basically they serve a lot of the food we enjoyed when we went to Europe a couple of years ago: spaezle, roast duck, homemade sauerkraut, schnitzel, escargot, etc. etc. etc.  They even fly some of the desserts in from Italy.  Ooooh!  The piece de resistance on their dessert menu is an apple strudel made fresh by the chef's 80-something year old Czech mom.

All in all I think we did a pretty good job celebrating this handsome guy.

Happy birthday Scott!  Henry and I love you to the moon and back.