Happy Birthday! + cake (it's real)

My husband just had a birthday! On his birthday we went to a nice Italian restaurant with a generous gift card we had gotten from friends.

An amusing anecdote that shows we've continued becoming/being German: When we got to the restaurant we saw the sign on the door saying 'closed'. Oh dear. We checked the times and it said they were supposed to be open..but we went back to wait in the car. I figured it couldn't hurt to call them, so I did and asked if they were open. Yes, they were...she had just forgotten to turn the sign around :)

When we went in, we mentioned that it was very German of us to not come in (or even try the door(!)) because the sign said closed. She agreed, and said that it was also very Italian of her to just forget to turn the sign around :).

We ate lots of delicious food, from the standard side dish (bread to dip in olive oil and herbs) to the h'ors de ouvres (mushrooms with a gorgonzola sauce) to the main dishes (frutta de mare pizza + a delicious pork dish) to the dessert (crema catalana + pana cotta). Wow. Delicious. (And we figured, we might as well use the gift card in one fell swoop and we did pretty well. The rest we used as the tip :) )

You can see their birthday sign in the background :)

Then we celebrated on Friday with friends. We ate bagna couda and I made a black forest cake. (This is a cake that F quite likes, so I wanted to make it for him, even though it's quite labor intensive.)

As I was more than half done, I realized that I should have asked F, or perhaps his mother, for tips, because apparently he had had such a cake almost every year for his birthday. And often helped. And here I was just trying to navigate my way through several recipes...ah well, if you don't ask, then how can you learn?

But the cake turned out well and I now know who to ask for tips for next year :)

Anyway, we then played games, like Mario Cart, Morphology and Quelf :) Good times had by all.