I am such a lucky girl I should have rabbit’s feet!

Two (Count them wha ha ha!!!) Two, birthday cakes for me.

My sister, Tonya, and her lovely family were here for my birthday a couple of weeks ago and she was kind enough to want to make a birthday cake for me so I gladly said yes- do it please! Then of course, my sweet husband usually makes my birthday cake and I didn’t want to miss out on that- so greedy little me got two this year. Oh boy!

Here is a picture of the beautiful Ms. T wearing my favorite new apron made by my super-talented friend, Jill. These will be sold shortly on One Wish World a very fabulous website, created by our very fabulous friend, Mindy. It is a website with a heart that reaches out to help the world and at the same time brings you creations from very talented artists that you won’t find anywhere else.

Rick made a Favorite Fudge cake and put some lovely little bees and a flower on it just for me. If I haven’t told you – I love bees and one of my ambitions (out of many) is to be able to keep a couple of hives someday. The recipe for the cake is in the archives under Five little chocolate wedding cakes all in a row, so I won’t repeat it here. It is so yummy and it just gets better each day- of course it never lasts too long round here.

My sister made a variation out of Dorie Greenspan’s  ( Baking From My Home to Yours -one of my favorite new cookbooks) using the recipe for Black and White Chocolate Cake, and turning the Dark Chocolate cream part into a Grand Marnier flavored cream and then pouring a Chocolate ganache over the top and topping with yet more ganache this time in White Chocolate. It was so yummy too! Thanks T.

We had a picnic in the park with family and the day was complete. Two of my nephews are learning Cricket so they taught the other kids. Sticky wickets! I forgot my camera so no pictures of the picnic.

The menu for the picnic was:

1. Oven “Fried” Chicken
2. Pressed Picnic Sandwich in a Sourdough hubcap
3. Pasta salad
4. Coleslaw
5. Deviled Eggs
6. Clam Dip and chips and Veggie platter
7. Green Onion cheese-ball with almonds and Parmesan garlic bagel crisps
8. Assorted Olives and Pickles
9. Home made Zatarain’s Root-beer
10. Watermelon

It’s surprising that we could stuff cake and ice cream down after that- but we pulled through and did them both justice.