Birthday Food

I forgot to mention J's bday food choices: Eggo waffles for breakfast, hot lunch at school, and meat, cheese, bread and Russian dressing (bottled kind is always too sweet!) to make sandwiches from a (literally) world famous deli called Zingerman's in our area. For dessert she wanted cheesecake, which I made and decorated with strawberries in the center and mandarin oranges around the edge so it looked like a giant flower.

For her family birthday party, I needed food to serve 24. I'd picked up a 9.5lb. pork tenderloin for $17 on sale the previous week, so I marinated that and we grilled it--delicious! My mother in law brought potato salad and I made a Caesar salad. I ended up making 2 cakes, because I went to the store wanting to buy 2 boxes of Mam Papaul's Black Velvet cake mix (tastes like homemade) to make one GIANT cake and they only had one box, so I bought one chocolate and one lemon velvet. The box contains a frosting mix, which you add milk to and simmer in saucepan till thick. Then you cool it and add a LOT of butter and some cream cheese--absolutely delcicious. So I made the cakes one day and did the cooking part of the frosting, added the butter and cream cheese and frosted them the next, and decorated them the day of the party. The chocolate frosting was light brown, and I made it purple, but then D. said it would look MORE purple and less muddy if I added yellow. I tried it and now it was dirt brown! Added more purple and it was now darker purple. Adding orange made it look like darker dirt, so added MORE purple and called it quits--it was an iridescent dark brown, actually looked nice on a light brown background.