Party in the SWVA

The Gnome and I were invited to two cookouts this past weekend: one to celebrate a friend's 30th birthday and the other to celebrate a couple's 1st anniversary. I made the same dessert to take to both parties: a fruit pizza. I got the recipe from allrecipes.com: Fruit Pizza II. I used reduced fat cream cheese and lite Cool Whip for the pizza "sauce." I went fruit shopping on Friday to get the supplies and got raspberries, blueberries, kiwis, and pineapple. Of course, we already had a surplus of strawberries from our strawberry picking extravaganza. Here is fruit pizza #1 (pic from camera phone):

Do you see the hidden message? Well, do ya? It took people at the party a while to notice. I think it's probably easier to see in the picture.


And fruit pizza #2:

It has an orange juice/lemon juice/sugar sauce drizzled on top. Someone brought oatmeal raisin cookies to party #1. One party-goer had the crazy idea to dip the cookies in the extree sauce I brought. This led to much cookie dipping that would likely rival oreos and milk. Try it sometime...you might love it :)


Also, I forgot to share my most recent cake decorating feat. I made a fudge marble/chocolate buttercream cake for some friends that are departing for CA next month. We will be sad to see them go, but hopefully this will motivate us to go on a trip to CA. Their names are Holly and Zach, and since they are moving back to CA near LA, I thought it would be fitting to decorate the cake to look like the Hollywood sign using their names. 

I got the Gnome to make me a template and print the text out flipped backwards. I traced it onto wax paper with clear piping gel and transferred it onto the cake. Then I just traced away with my icing. After piping a billion stars to fill in the "mountain," I finished the bottom of the cake with a rope border. My mom saw the picture of the cake and asked, "what is the significance of the brown top and green bottom?" So I guess it wasn't completely obvious what I was trying to depict. Oh well. Maybe it's because there was no sky...