Birthday wrap-up

Clockwise, from top right: T. Bob hanging out at the playground on our walk; My painted pumpkin; Enjoying his birthday ice cream at Benihana; Demon guarding the gate at The Frightmare Compound.

This weekend was my husband's birthday (for purposes of this blog, he will henceforth be known as T. Bob). Since it's five days before Halloween, and he loves Halloween, celebrating typically involves a fair amount of holiday activities. On Friday night, we had dinner at Bao with friends and then went to see Bad Grandpa. It was funny, but there were a little too many poop-related jokes for my taste (which I should've expected from a Jackass movie, but oh well). However, I highly recommend the AMC Theatres at Flatiron Crossing;  they recently upgraded to all-recliner seating, and you choose your seat when you buy your ticket, so it's convenient and cozy, two of my favorite things.

On Saturday, we had lunch with family at Benihana. They sang a birthday song in Japanese, which was highly entertaining. After lunch, we enjoyed some birthday cake, which I have dubbed the Fail Cake. T. Bob loves carrot cake and I've used this recipe before with great success, but this year it just did not work out for me. I set out to make a two-layer, nine-inch round cake. I greased and floured my pans and baked as usual, but when I tried to remove the cake from the pan, it would not budge. Like, at all. One of the rounds ended up ripping in half after I shook it a little too vigorously. But no worries, I just decided I would leave them in the pans and we would have two separate, smaller cakes.

Then it was time to decorate. Now, I am not a great cake decorator by any means, but I have taken the first series of Wilton decorating classes, and I have some basic skills under my belt. But I threw caution to the wind and decided to freehand a dinosaur onto this cake. Ordinarily, I would've made a piping-gel transfer and then covered it with frosting, but I got overconfident (and also lazy) and thought I could do it all on my own. It turns out I could not:

The Fail Cake. There aren't even children around to bla – uh, take credit for this.

So I added another element of fail to the Fail Cake. On the plus side, it was still very tasty, and T. Bob ended up smashing it together with ice cream and extra frosting, so I don't think he was too upset about it. 

That afternoon, we decided to get started on the Halloween portion of the festivities, so we bought pumpkins and some hard cider and headed home. As I am extremely accident-prone and also lazy, we opted to forgo carving this year and painted them instead. Way less labor intensive.

My spiderweb pumpkin with T. Bob's Joker.

We rounded out the evening with a walk through the trees to check out all the fall colors (including a pit stop at the playground), a trip to the Frightmare Compound, and Sleepy Hollow (the movie, not the TV show, though I've heard good things about the latter). We're headed to Vegas on Wednesday, so I'm sure we'll do some more celebrating there – because all birthdays deserve to be celebrated for at least a week. :) What fun Halloween (Halloween-y?) activities have you all been up to?