After he spent two months in Afghanistan (missing Thanksgiving/Christmas/Chanukkah/New Years and MY birthday), I wanted to do something special for my husband’s birthday. It was his birthday 10 days after he got back from the ‘Stan and I thought he’d want a get-togeteher will his friends so I was really surprised when I asked him about throwing a dinner party or having friends over for dinner that he told me that he just wanted to have a low-key birthday with me and the kids.
His birthday morning arrived and I decided to bake him a cake and get a few of his favorite things… for my husband this means Single Malt Scotch, chocolates and a home cooked meal! I picked up a bunch of ‘guy’ cookbooks from the library and told him I’d cook any meal in there! One a side note… A week later, he choose the bourbon and brown sugar salmon from the Esquire Eat Like a Man cookbook and it was incredibly delicious!
For choosing the Scotch, I played it safe and picked bottles that I know he’s had in the past, including his favorite, the Balvenie Double Wood. I printed out a ‘write up’ of each Scotch, with information about the nose, taste and finish of each. He was super impressed with my knowledge and research of single malt scotch whisky but I did admit to him that I got all the information direct from the distiller’s website!
For his cake, I have to admit that baking is not my forte! I picked up two boxes of white cake mix from my local grocery store so that I could make a 9 inch 4 layer cake. I spread Nutella (gorgeous hazelnut chocolate spread) inside the cake between the layers and stuck hazelnut pirouette sticks on the outside. So, the cake may not have looked incredible but it sure did taste good! My only complaint was that the pirouettes lost their crunch because they were pressed against buttercream frosting.
For the decorations, I kept things really simple. I created a simple blue, white and yellow pennant style banner and I made some tissue pompoms from tissue paper. I hung the pompoms with white lanterns. Tissue paper pompoms are so easy to make- you just a need a little patience! Here’s a tutorial that I posted a while back showing how to make these. The banner was really easy to put together: print, cut, punch holes and thread ribbon. Again, here’s a tutorial that I posted on putting together banners!
So, happy birthday to my amazing husband who came home after months overseas, spent 2 weeks at home and is now on another trip. Thankfully, this one is only 5 weeks and he’ll be staying the in the States!
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