Bee's Birthday Bonanza!

(photo by S.B.)

Wednesday was Bee’s birthday. We spent the week celebrating. You must remember that my version of ‘celebrating’ is ‘eating’.

On Monday, we had The Four Families over for dinner. That is the new name I came up with for our in-town ‘relatives’, the ex-in-laws-by-marriage. I love the Mafiosa ring to the name, and have therefore been slipping it into random conversations all week. Although amused, none of the other members of The Four Families seem to be as impressed with my awesomeness as I am.

So Monday night was pizza from Guido’s (in keeping with the stereotypical Mafiosa theme). Oh, and a little cake:

See the size of that puppy? The creation of that monster was no small feat, I’ll have you know! It entailed making the cake itself, a ‘simple syrup’ (which is just a fancy word for ‘sugar water’) that is then brushed onto each of the three cake layers, followed by a coconut filling, followed by a cream cheese icing, followed by toasted coconut shavings pressed around the perimeter. Yes, I toasted coconut myself. It took me two days to create the cake, and about ten seconds to reduce each slice to a crumbling mound as I attempted to remove pieces from the giant confectionery. They just don’t make knives big enough.

The cake was good, by the way. Not too sweet (probably because I daringly ignored the recipe and used unsweetened coconut), but rich, nonetheless. Most members of The Four Families just shared slices. I would have been insulted that no one was up for seconds, except that even I wasn’t up for seconds. That tells you how rich it was. Of course, I might have been up for seconds had I not baked the damn thing and therefore known what went into it.

What went into it, you ask? Why – besides the 6 ½ cups of heavy cream, the 11 cups of full-fat coconut, and 11 cups of various sugars – there was a little bit of butter. And by ‘a little bit’, I mean 10.

Cubes.

10 cubes.

10 cubes of butter.

10 cubes of butter.

!!!

It was delicious and all, but my arteries are still a little sluggish and my stomach won’t stop roiling. And Mr. C is still bouncing off the walls four days later.

If you want the recipe, you’ll have to look up ‘Robert Carter’s Peninsula Grill Coconut Cake’ in Bobby Flay’s Throwdown! cookbook; if I try to re-write the recipe here, my body will probably go into cardiac arrest in revolt.

Anyhoo, we had an enjoyable evening with The Four Families. The bonus to the affair was that it forced us to clean our house – even sweep under the couches!: events that we only do if company is coming.

With the house clean, I was not embarrassed to have a babysitter come over Tuesday afternoon to stay with Mr. C whilst I took Bee out to lunch. Our favorite Thai restaurant offered a fantastic deal at Christmas: buy $100-worth of gift cards; get $100 free. Bee and I decided to go in on the deal as our Christmas gift to each other, with the idea that we can now spend the rest of the year occasionally going out to eat some Pad Thai. Or all the Pad Thai you can eat. This restaurant has a lunch buffet, complete with sushi; I basically wiped them out of that. Talk about getting your money’s worth!

It’s a baaaad idea to let me near a buffet. Buffets are pretty much my favorite type of food.

Tuesday evening, because I am selfless, I allowed Bee to have an evening alone with Mr. C. They apparently had a dinner of cheese and leftover pizza. And an orange. You’d think I was in charge of the meal. Then they watched Tim Burton’s Charlie and the Chocolate Factory, which freaked Bee out as much as I thought it would. When I saw that movie years ago, even I was a little offended by how obviously Johnny Depp was attempting to channel Michael Jackson, and what he was therefore trying to imply. Kinda creepy.

To wash the creepiness out of their systems, Bee and Mr. C then switched to the newer version of Journey to the Center of the Earth, a movie Bee hated when he saw it years ago, but apparently forgot that he hated and therefore checked out from the library again. A benefit of getting older: you get to re-experience things over and over and have them seem brand new each time! As it was, Bee reported that they pretty much fast-forwarded to the dinosaur parts.

And what was I doing during all this? I was meeting friends at the cheapie theater to watch the newest installment of the Twilight saga. My heart had been doing summersaults of joy and I’d been unable to sleep for the last two weeks, ever since Twilight finally made it to the cheapie theater. Not because I am a Twihard. But because I really, really, really needed a good laugh. My friends and I have met for every part and snorted our way through each one, and it has truly given me something to look forward to each year. In fact, I’m a little despondent that there’s only one more movie left.

Which, I suppose, kind of makes me a Twihard, after all.

Oh, the horror.

Yesterday, Bee’s birthday itself, I made scones for breakfast. These scones, the recipe of which I got from one of my June Cleaver students, are so delicious they should be outlawed. The batch makes enough for about 10 regular-sized scones, so you’re supposed to freeze whatever batter you don’t use to bake fresh on mornings to come. Unfortunately, we love these little plops of heaven so much that I’ve been making our scones bigger and bigger, which means the three-to-four of us are lucky to get more than one meal out of them. I’ll post the recipe below.

For dinner, with the help of Martha Stewart, I made steamed broccoli, chicken Milanese and cheese-potato scones (because you can’t get enough scones). Making dinner for Bee was a very risky gift; one might go so far as to call it a ‘white elephant gift’, since Bee doesn’t tend to enjoy my cooking. 

It was a little touch-and-go at first, seeing as how I didn't have a meat mallet with which to pound the chicken flat.  However, intrepid cook that I am, I improvised:

got wood?

My mallet worked, perhaps, a little too well:

mmmm . . . appetizing!

However, perhaps because Bee took over the frying of the chicken himself – the meal came out mostly not so very bad.

Chicken Milanese

Potato Scones.  OK, so I couldn't get them to look pretty at first, but they were VERY tasty.

The meal was – once again – quite rich, seeing as how two of the items were fried. My stomach couldn’t take more than a few bites of each. Of course, that may have also had something to do with the half-dozen Vanilla Rich Chocolate Chip Cookies baked for the Cookie Co-Op that I inhaled earlier in the day.

Bee and S.B. were both quite supportive of my dinner efforts, however, and I made it all up to Bee anyway by getting him a pint of Phish Food as part of his birthday present.

The other part of his present has been to leave him with the house to himself for the weekend: I have taken Mr. C and we are now visiting my parents.

Part of our “long car trip survival pack”. DON’T JUDGE ME!

OK, maybe this trip is more of a gift for me than for Bee, but I’m sure he’s getting at least a little enjoyment out of it. I mean, I know Bee will miss us and worry about us making the long drive and all, but he gets the house to himself for five whole days! I wonder what that’s like! Because I don’t think I will ever know that kind of peace again! Certainly not for another twenty years! And maybe not even then, as Mr. C is shaping up to be a good ol’ mamma’s boy, and will probably not move out until he’s forty!

Luckily for Mr. C, he’ll never be that spoiled of a mamma’s boy, as my need for peace will supersede even my extreme love for him, so I will therefore be kicking his ass out as soon as he turns 21.

Or maybe 25.

Or maybe Bee’s age.

Because the gifts of confidence and independence that I’ll be forcing on him are much better presents than the potato scones and Ben and Jerry’s I got Mr.C’s dad when he turned that age.

OK, so the scones in the background may not appear appetizing, but just look at my pretty bacon!

The Devil's Own Scones

Mix together:
3 c. flour
1/2 c. sugar
3/4 t. salt
2 1/2 t. baking powder
1/2 t. baking soda

Cut in 'til cornmeal texture (cheat: use a food processor):
3/4 cup firm cold butter

Add:
1 c. sour cream (or buttermilk, or vanilla yogurt plus 1 t. baking soda)
1-1 1/2 c. mixed berries
2T. jam

Bake @ 350 for 15-20 minutes

You can freeze them in balls and bake frozen if company comes; unless -- of course -- you'd rather be a fat-ass and eat them all at once.