Day 638: J's birthday
Dec. 14th, 2021 11:57 pm![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
eve_primeToday was J's birthday, and I think it was positive overall. He did have to start the day by doing two 40-minute presentations about his R-coding project (on his day off), but he concluded that it had gone fine. During D's lunch break, he opened his presents. D. had given him a new Steam game. I gave him, hm, four manga (Bokuben 7-10), a novel (Sanderson's Cytonic), and a graphic novel (also by Sanderson), a DVD (the Castlevania anime), and two t-shirts (a second one for Hollow Knight, and one for A Certain Scientific Railgun). When he went away to sword class, I finished the surprise I'd been working on, and when he got home, D, DG, and AA were already here, as was dinner.
The surprise was a marzipan-coated cake! He'd been disappointed when Market of Choice couldn't do that, but then I thought, hey, I know how to bake, and I watched a video about doing a marzipan coating, and I ordered a block of British marzipan online. Then yesterday while he was playing Magic I baked the cake (two layers, from a mix) and put it in the freezer. Today I iced the cake (I just bought frosting and stirred in some blackberry preserves), then did the marzipan layer. There was so much marzipan left over that I colored it and cut out little shapes, which I sprinkled on the top:
Dinner was from BJ's, one of his favorite restaurants, although I have yet to find anything from their extensive menu that I actually like. He and DG split two orders of wings (barbecue and extra spicy). AA had lentil soup. D had four sliders; I probably should have gotten that. I had broccoli-cheddar soup, but it wasn't tasty enough to finish. I'd also ordered a fancy-looking thing called "avocado eggrolls," with perfectly fine-sounding ingredients (avocado | cream cheese | sun-dried tomatoes | red onions | cilantro | chipotle peppers), but I'd gotten it to share, and nobody else liked that list of ingredients, and it turned out to taste terrible. We had a lot of nice conversation with our friends and D, though, and people liked the cake. Even vegan AA enjoyed the cake because she could eat the sprinkled marzipan shapes.
The surprise was a marzipan-coated cake! He'd been disappointed when Market of Choice couldn't do that, but then I thought, hey, I know how to bake, and I watched a video about doing a marzipan coating, and I ordered a block of British marzipan online. Then yesterday while he was playing Magic I baked the cake (two layers, from a mix) and put it in the freezer. Today I iced the cake (I just bought frosting and stirred in some blackberry preserves), then did the marzipan layer. There was so much marzipan left over that I colored it and cut out little shapes, which I sprinkled on the top:
Dinner was from BJ's, one of his favorite restaurants, although I have yet to find anything from their extensive menu that I actually like. He and DG split two orders of wings (barbecue and extra spicy). AA had lentil soup. D had four sliders; I probably should have gotten that. I had broccoli-cheddar soup, but it wasn't tasty enough to finish. I'd also ordered a fancy-looking thing called "avocado eggrolls," with perfectly fine-sounding ingredients (avocado | cream cheese | sun-dried tomatoes | red onions | cilantro | chipotle peppers), but I'd gotten it to share, and nobody else liked that list of ingredients, and it turned out to taste terrible. We had a lot of nice conversation with our friends and D, though, and people liked the cake. Even vegan AA enjoyed the cake because she could eat the sprinkled marzipan shapes.