Party Time!

One evening, Andrew sat at the kitchen table and admired a shiny, new Alaska state coin. He had just received it in the mail from a friend of ours who lives in Oregon. He stopped for a moment and his math wheels started turning. He looked at Steve…looked at the coin…looked at Steve again and then said with astonishment, “Steve has been alive longer than Alaska has been a state!”

Yup! Alaska joined the state of the union in 1959. Our sweet Steve was already ten years old!

March 15, 2009 Steve turned 60, and from dawn until dusk we celebrated. We began the day by serving Steve breakfast in bed, giving him our homemade cards and gift of a bonified Hoonah tourist T-shirt. With breakfast over, he lounged his way downstairs to be greeted by colorful birthday posters all over the walls designed by Andrew. I added some age appropriate quotes…

“I’m at the age that my back goes out more than I do.” Phyllis Dillar

“Inside every older person is a younger person wondering what the hell happened!”
Cora Harvey Armstrong

“Getting old ain’t for sissies.” – Betty Davis

“Time may be a great healer but it’s a lousy beautician” – Unknown

“Old age isn’t so bad when you consider the alternative” – Maurice Chevalier

“Life is a moderately good play with a badly written third act” – Truman Capote

“The secret of staying young is to live honestly, eat slowly and lie about your age.” – Lucille Ball

Steve loves to cook, so we spent the rest of the day preparing the main dish and dessert for our twenty guests that were coming for dinner. He reveled in perfecting gourmet lasagna with a homemade sauce that he started simmering the day before; Italian sausage, stewed tomatoes, olives, mushrooms, spices. He made layer upon layer of delicious cheeeesy, saussy delight. He even made me a small veggie lasagna. Andrew and I were covering the dessert end of things. We really wanted to make him a yummy birthday cake from scratch. It would be our first attempt at such a venture, so we proceeded with caution. It was German Chocolate cake recipe I found on epicurious.com. It had a four fork rating. I read all the reviews (three times), took notes and had Steve’s assurance, as he rattled off standard cake ingredients, that it would impossible to mess up. “It’s just flour, butter and sugar….”

As my mother would say, “famous last words.” I was doubling the recipe, using metal round cake tins (instead of 9x13 glass) and had a mixing bowl so full of batter that my hand mixer couldn’t touch the bottom of the bowl. The store didn’t sell “German Sweet Bakers Chocolate, so Andrew and I chunked together our own concoction of Hersey’s milk chocolate, Semi-sweet Baker’s chocolate and a Steve’s favorite Swiss Dark chocolate candy bar. It melted beautifully into a rich sauce that was added as the base flavor of the batter. The store didn’t sell full-fledged butter milk, so with a sigh I conceded to low fat. Not that such a slight subtraction of fat would matter when the recipe called for eight sticks of butter! I cooked the frosting too fast and it never quite got hard enough, even after I placed it in the freezer. In the end the cake was sticking so badly to the pans we had to cut it out of the metal tins, the middles had fallen and the coconut - pecan frosting was oozing and dripping all over the side of the cake…not a pretty site BUT….the good thing was it was delicious…really, really yummy. Steve is still eating birthday cake (when I doubled the recipe I ended up yielding 3 full two layer cakes) and he says it gets better with each day. (much like he does actually!)

The party was so much fun…everyone brought food….veggie platters, salads, freshly baked bread and wine. A couple brought their guitar and sang a couple funny songs and Andrew performed some piano pieces. The stand up comedian came out in him when he announced two of his numbers. He prefaced his Halloween song by saying, “Turning 60 can be scary, so I thought a Halloween song would be good.” And then he said, “Some folks may say Steve is over the hill, but we think he is just ‘Coming around the mountain!’”

Here are some pictures of our friends...

Dinner was delightful. Everyone raved about the lasagna. Conversation was great, two cakes were devoured, and it seemed that everyone had a good time, especially our birthday boy. Here’s to another great year!