Tag: birthdays

Birthday Week CakeWalk (BWCW) Day 7: FINALE!

by Karen, posted in (it's all about the) food, celebrations

Today is the final day of my birthday week cakewalk, because today is my birthday! To celebrate, I decided to go all out and get nine cakes instead of just one! Is that wrong?
It’s okay, they’re minis! Mini cupcakes from The Cake Cottage in Wells!

These cupcakes are amazing. I haven’t eaten every one of them yet, but I’ve had enough of them to know that they are so worth eating.

The lemon is my favorite so far, but as I said, they are all delicious. If I could build my own, I would make a chocolate cupcake, strawberry frosting, and the green angel wing things from the lemon cupcake. 🙂

I hope I have inspired you to have your own birthday week cakewalk this year. I hope you had fun participating in mine! 🙂

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Birthday Week CakeWalk (BWCW) Day 6

by Karen, posted in (it's all about the) food, celebrations, friends

Getting to the home stretch! Today’s cake was a present from my friend, Jane. Thanks for taking the pressure off with the cake-finding mission today, Jane!

Actually, I should have said today’s cakes, because Jane gifted me with a Cake Trifecta! Lemon, Chocolate Bomb, and Fruit Tart (because fruit is healthy!).

Oh, and the cakes came with a side of flowers.

What a treat this was!

All three of these cakes were delicious. All pass. Full disclosure: I didn’t eat all of them all! Only half! I swear!

🙂

One more day to go.

Birthday Week CakeWalk (BWCW) Day 4

by Karen, posted in (it's all about the) food, celebrations, local fun

Wow, Day 4 already! It is going by TOO FAST. Today’s cake is from Spiller Farm in Wells, and it’s a Boston Cream Pie.

Boston Cream Pie

I grew up eating these cakes, or pies, as they are officially called. I know not why. There is no pie crust. There is no (traditional) pie filling. What there is is a yellow spongy cake, pastry cream, and chocolate frosting. That adds up to a cake in my book.

In the taste department, it was just okay. The cake was sort of wet, for some reason, and not in a good way. I am giving this cake a fail. It doesn’t live up to the Boston Cream Pies of yore. I wouldn’t buy it again.

Birthday Week CakeWalk (BWCW) Day 5

by Karen, posted in (it's all about the) food, celebrations, friends

Day 5! Today’s cake had to be great to make up for yesterday’s fail. I went to Mike’s Clamshack Fish Market. My friend Barney said, “It’s that time again already?!”

I bought cakes here for last year’s cakewalk too.


Anyway, I got the Lemon Blueberry Cake with Lemon Buttercream made by Something Different. This is a tried and true cake. No indecision or angst here.

I am further celebrating by eating it at the ocean! Sublime. This cake surely is a ‘pass’ on the pass/fail scale, and then some.
I am taking a chance and posting third from my phone, so apologies if it’s not looking right. I’ll check it on the computer later.
Onward!

Birthday club

by Karen, posted in (it's all about the) food, friends, quest for the best, restaurants

Strawberry Nutella CrepeI am part of a great group of nurses who all work from home. Once a month we (mostly) all get together for breakfast and to celebrate a birthday, if there is one that month. This month we went to Two Hands Crepe and Juice Bar in Brunswick.

Okay, it’s a hike to Brunswick from Wells, but you can get thay-uh from he-uh, and it was totally worth the trip.

I ordered a sweet: the Strawberry and Nutella Crepe (pictured on the left) and it was EXCELLENT. The birthday girl, Annette, ordered a savory: the egg, ham, and cheese. Annette, who has spent time recently in France (I know, right??), said that her crepe compared favorably to ones she’d had there. So…Two Hands got a hit!

The space itself was sunny and bright. The staff was caring and conscientious. The artwork (paintings of animals) that adorned the walls was compelling. The giraffe Made. My. Day. 🙂

My only regret was that I didn’t have time to go visit the farmers market happening around the corner. It looked fabulous (note to self: plan extra time for the next Friday morning visit).

If you are in Brunswick for breakfast, go check them out.

(Hint: There is no parking lot. Find a space on the street out front.)

Bon appetit! 

(I know, predictable! But I couldn’t resist!!)

🙂

 

 

To boldly go, part one

by Karen, posted in Adult children, family, my one word, teens, Travel

disney blog 1My daughter has been asking to go to Disney since she was about 9 years old. I would always listen to her ask, nod, smile, and say that tried and true line that I’d borrowed from my own mother: “We’ll see.” I got away with that for, oh, 5 years or so. Five years during which she watched many of her friends go to Disney. Five  years during which she watched her older brother go to Disney (in fairness, I never took him either-he was an adult and paid his own way when he went). Five years during which she got older and smarter and my “We’ll see” was starting to fall a little flat, even to my own ears.

A few years ago, she changed her tack; instead of asking to go, she started asking to go for her sixteenth birthday. That changed the game completely. That was a line in the sand. “We’ll see” is timeless, fluid, eternal. “By my sixteenth birthday” was a finish line. I stopped saying, “We’ll see” to my daughter and started thinking, “What if…?” to myself.

Since my one word this year is ‘brave’, the ‘what if’s’ have become more insistent. So what if I haven’t been on a plane in, oh, 25 years or so? So what if my vacation hours at work are precious and few? My daughter will only turn sixteen once. So what if park passes cost more than the airfare? So what if we live far away from an airport with a direct flight to where we are going? So what if the idea of getting us there and back is, um, terrifying?

We’re going.

Telling our story

by Karen, posted in Adult children, Angels, family, good grief, knitting, The write words at the write time

scarfI was at a craft show a couple of weekends ago. The weather was awful–freezing rain coating the icy snow on the ground that fell overnight. As soon as I got through the door, I stopped to shake it off of me. The first thing I saw was a table of scarves and hats, and the small dark-eyed woman standing behind it caught my eye.

I took a minute to look at the items on the table. I noticed a black and white scarf  that I knew would make a great gift for a number of the people on my list.

I asked, “How much is this?”

“Fifteen dollars,” she replied, “and you can pick a free cookbook from the box,” she added, hopeful, hands clasped in front of her.

I looked down. The ‘cookbooks’ were some old cooking magazines from 2008.

Well, all-righty then.

As she was wrapping it up, I was looking through my bag for my checkbook (note to self: Clean this damn thing out!).

I asked, “Did you make these?”

“Yes. Well, me and my daughter did. And then after she died, I made some more myself,” she told me.

What? Oh, no.

“Oh, I’m sorry,” I told her, and suddenly found myself hugging her. “Yes, it was hard,” she said, and proceeded to tell me about how her diabetic daughter who couldn’t feel her feel very well had a blood sugar drop that caused her to get into a car accident. “She went through the windshield and died instantly, the…the….” she trailed off.

“Medical examiner?” I offered.

“Yes! Yes, the medical examiner said. She didn’t feel anything, he said, and that made me feel a little better, but I was still pretty sad. Until my birthday,” she said.

This is what happened on her birthday: She and her husband were having lunch, feeling the feelings only parents who have lost their child feel. Suddenly, her glass of water slid across the table. About four inches. By itself. “I said, ‘Did you see that?’ to my husband. “‘That’s her wishing you a Happy Birthday,’ he told me, and we both teared up. Then I felt much better. I knew she was okay.”

Sometimes, people just need to tell their story.

Even if they aren’t writers.

Mental health break

by Karen, posted in (it's all about the) food, family, italian, Marriage, NaNoWriMo, restaurants, writing

IMG_0012I took a two-day break from Nano writing and went away overnight to celebrate my husband’s birthday (and, you know, to take a break from sitting! At the computer! Writing! OMG! I haven’t been able to feel two of the fingers on my left hand for a week!).  We had supper at Nolita,  a new-ish Italian restaurant in York that we like.

I felt a little bad that he hadn’t had a cake on his birthday and gotten to hear the sweet strains of the “Happy Birthday to You” song wafting toward his ears on his day, but so be it. We wanted to have the cake with the entire family, and that couldn’t happen until the following day.

When we arrived at the restaurant, my husband had to run back to the car to get his reading glasses (he is so not into my rendition of “This is what’s on the menu” that he’d rather run back out into the 27 degree cold dark night that to listen to it).

That’s when the waitress came over and I mentioned it was my husband’s birthday. She said, “Does he like tiramisu?  We give a free tiramisu for someone’s birthday.”

Now, Bill does not like tiramisu, but oh my God! I love it!  But, it was his birthday after all, so I asked if there were other dessert options and she said they have gelato. As (my) luck would have it, I’m pretty sure the only thing he dislikes more than tiramisu is gelato.

“Yes, he does like tiramisu! Bring that!” I said, conscience clear.

What I hadn’t realized (and in fairness to me, I was halfway through my Italia Margarita at the time) was that said tiramisu would be accompanied by, um, fanfare. And I’m pretty sure that if there is one thing Bill dislikes more than gelato and tiramisu, it’s fanfare. In our 26 or more (we can’t agree on this) years together, he has never, ever seen a cake coming toward him with a gaggle of servers singing the birthday song to him.

And yet, I lived to tell the tale, so it’s all good.

Also, that tiramisu rocked!

 

 

 

Time: is it on my side?

by Karen, posted in (it's all about the) food, Midlife Crisis, no fear, Turning 50

I made a decision the week that I turned 50 and also was on vacation: I wouldn’t wear my watch. I had a couple of goals.

1. To stop being so ruled by the time of day it was (eg: “time for breakfast” or “time for bed”)

2. To make my vacation feel longer.

So for about 10 days, I didn’t wear my watch. It turned out that on the few occasions when I tried to guess the time, my guesses were usually pretty close: within 15 minutes or so of the actual time. Of course, for the first several days, I looked at my watch-less wrist to see what time it was, but then when I remembered that I wore no watch, I just said, “Okay, I don’t know what time it is,” and was okay with that.

I didn’t start wearing my watch again until today. I put it on this morning, then after i looked at it for the third time and realized that it still said 10:12AM (not to mention that it was also a day behind on the date!), the ugly truth was revealed: THE BATTERY STOPPED.

Really? Really?

Is the Universe sending me a message?

Staring down fifty

by Karen, posted in (it's all about the) food, family, friends, Marriage, Midlife Crisis, Turning 50

I’m going to be 50 this year and have been thinking about what I want to do about it. It seems like a great opportunity for it not to be “just another birthday”. I have had a lot of ideas about how to mark the milestone as well as how to celebrate the day. I started my scrapbook for “My Fiftieth Year” and it’s halfway ready to go. I’ll finish setting it up by or on May 19 (at a scrapbooking event with my friend Susan).

I’m worried though, because as I told my friends (Susan, Deb, Elisabeth) and my daughter yesterday: I’m afraid that I have so many ideas that I won’t commit to one and will end up doing nothing. My friend’s husband celebrated his turning 50 by subscribing to “AARP”. Hmmm…I’ll think about that later.

My friend Deb is also turning 50 this year, and I envy her focus. She wants to take a trip, and even knows where she wants to go. This reminded me that I want to take a trip too! I want to go to Italy, to or near Avellino!  But I think I want to be in my home state for my actual birthday. Plus, my husband wants to go someplace else if we take a trip (like Bermuda).

I want to have an Italian birthday cake from La Cascia’s in Burlington, MA, but no one in my immediate family likes this kind of cake. The idea of 50 mini cupcakes (from Somethin’ Sweet in Sanford) surrounding one normal size cupcake (or 6 inch cheesecake?)  with an inscription of some sort would be really cool. That way, there would be something for everyone (read: no complaints that  “I don’t like chocolate!” or “I don’t like vanilla!”…minis can be ordered in many flavors). This is my Plan B.

Sigh. I’m going in circles. I saw somewhere that some people make a “Bucket List” of things to do in their 50th year. That might work.

How do people celebrate turning 50?

Anyone? Anyone?