Surprise Birthday Party for Gary

I already wrote about our team having a dinner and party for Gary’s 50th birthday, and I actually had tried to plan a surprise party that would correspond with that evening.  It didn’t work out, so I planned it for a few weeks later.  I was determined to do something special for such a big birthday.

I was very pleased that he was totally surprised.  That was hard to pull off with the party being at our house and me making a ton of food since the timing of it was around dinner time. We have had problems with our refrigerator and lots of food has been going bad this summer with the house being so hot (no AC).  I’m not sure what I was thinking when I made several things that required refrigeration.

I made ham and cheese pastry type things, tortilla pin wheels, bacon bread sticks, peanut butter/raisin/granola roll ups, pumpkin bread (using pureed pumpkin that I did in the fall and froze), chocolate chip cookies, chocolate covered pretzels, Oreo truffles (with the last of our Oreos that came from another country), a salsa dip to go with nachos, and then had fruit and veggies and dip.I was able to find this banner and some napkins that said 50 on them for the celebration.  Since Gary isn’t such the party buff/people person, I decided to only invite a handful of people besides those on our team.  If it were me, I would say the more people the better, but he isn’t that way. :-)Trent, our team leader, led a time where he interviewed Gary.  He asked him questions about each decade of his life, and then gave everyone a time to share something about Gary.  The part that people seemed to be interested in the most was Gary’s 7,000 mile bike trip across the US with his best friend after high school.I attempted to make a brownie ice cream cake.  It was not a success.  Once again, I’m not sure what I was thinking of trying to do something like this in the heat.  Even though I didn’t let the ice cream get too soft before placing it between the cake layers, the ice cream melted and went to the sides before it set.  I’m not sure if the problem was our freezer, the heat, or a combination of the two.  So, I ended up just serving ice cream along with the brownie cake.