Birthday Craziness

I spent all of Friday night baking and icing the cake I was making for Bandit's birthday. He wasn't going to be able to eat it, but I got him some dog biscuits to make up for it.

The cake I made was chocolate cake with chocolate amaretto filling, vanilla buttercream frosting, covered in marshmallow fondant. It was good, but super rich. I'll probably try a white cake recipe next time.

I was really happy with how it turned out! Marc came up with the theme, and I made the sheep and mini-Bandit out of gum paste. It was harder to work with than the marzipan, but I needed something that was a pure white color. I made the figurines during the week and finished up the fondant work on Saturday.

For my cake, we got Fudgie the Whale ice cream cakes from Carvel. I used to get Carvel ice cream cakes all the time when I was a kid when we lived in Jersey. I was so excited that they opened one up in Los Altos. I love the cookie crunch in the middle. Yum.

I think we had about 20 people over for the party. Fun, but a bit chaotic, as always. And as always, we had way too much food. But it was awesome. I got really nice gifts (Marc gave me a beautiful diamond solitaire necklace, even though I told him I didn't need gifts this year) and had a blast playing games and chatting with everyone. The last people left a little after midnight, and Marc and I finished cleaning up before collapsing in bed. I woke up the next morning feeling like I was hung over (I wasn't drinking!). So most of Sunday was spent recovering on the couch, hehe.

We did go out that evening for dinner with my family at Texas Roadhouse. Yay for yummy rolls!

In other news, we've started our fourth IVF cycle. The drug protocol is the same (I had a lot of embryos that were high quality on day 3, so that part of it seemed to work), but the biopsy protocol is going to be different. They're going to try to biopsy when the embryos get to the more advanced blastocyst stage, where they will hopefully be more robust and will stand up to the procedure better. This means that they'll have to be frozen after biopsy, and we won't be doing a transfer until early May (if we have anything to transfer).

So, fingers crossed yet again. This type of procedure hasn't been done many times at all, so it's uncertain how well it will work (they did run tests that went well, but the traditional PGD procedure usually works well too, so...).

Alright, I think this is long enough! Until next time.