Friday, 12/17/2010

My mother-in-law, Jennifer, and brother-in-law, Spencer, are spending the weekend with us to celebrate Katie's 2nd birthday.  They both arrived tonight and had dinner with us.  I made Spicy Peanut Chicken with a Balsamic and Pear salad on the side.  For the salad, we used just a teaspoon of the vinaigrette.  It was plenty for the four of us.  Spencer doesn't care for craisins; so, I added those to the salad after he had taken his helping.  

After getting Katie to sleep for the night, I worked on decorating her Elmo birthday cake.  It was definitely a challenge to get the deep red and black colors for Elmo's face.  I ended up using an entire container of gel food coloring for each of those two colors.  I first applied the red frosting so that it was pretty smooth. Once I had full coverage, I roughed it up with my finger tips so that it looked more like Elmo.  I did have to make two batches of the butter cream frosting.  I used butter flavored shortening in the first batch and it made the base frosting too yellow.  In order to avoid a yellow-eyed Elmo, I made another batch with plain shortening.