Tanti Auguri

Happy Birthday to me. Well, as everyone knows, my birthday was more than a week ago, but a number of people have asked me how I celebrated so I figured I would give a brief update. A group of teachers here has developed quite a liking to the concept of TGIF and, as I noted before, is quite willing to put just about any day after the TGI. So, they decided that we hadn't had one in awhile and that we would do TGIDomenica (Sunday) which just happened to be my birthday. About a dozen of us met at Basilico, a small restaurant outside of Viterbo near the town of La Quercia. The mounds of antipasto and several glasses of wine was enough for me, but others had a main course, dolce and caffe as well.

After the splendid lunch, we rested for the evening and then had company for dinner of gnocchi gorgonzola followed by chocolate blackout cake which I baked on Friday and ganached on Saturday. The cake turned out just as it always does in the US thanks to our imported ingredients and persistent work to identify appropriate substituions. Below, I contemplate turning one and the damage done to the cake. Yup, the cake is parked on a Chrismas plate. Sometimes you just have to go with what you've got.

Fear not, I had a breakfast of birthday champions (more cake) the next morning, took some cake to friends at work and had all of my advisees over for cake in the afternoon so that by Monday night the cake was but a distant memory.