An Orange 14th Birthday!

Elizabeth celebrated her 14th birthday on Monday.  It's a big year for her--she graduates from the Waldorf school and heads off to high school. She spent last week taking placement exams and is waiting anxiously to see where she is placed.

Happily her birthday fell on President's Day so we had the day off to celebrate.  I did some birthday cooking in the morning and then Helen, Liz, and I headed out on the town for her special day.

Our first stop was a vintage clothing store which is two floors of designer vintage clothing and fabric. She loves fashion so this was a big hit. We stayed for a long time!

We then moved along to lunch at a local Italian restaurant and stopped in the neighboring chocolate shop afterwards. We didn't end up buying anything, but it was fun to look.

Finally, we went to the fabric store. She was getting tired of having her photo taken by this point :). I bought some fabric to make a new table runner for her birthday dinner. We all found little items for crafting.

After we got home it was time to work on the big dinner. I had decided to make a small, tall birthday cakes by baking the batter in cans. I used the tomato cans from the lasagna I had made earlier in the day. After I filled the cans I decided to quick look online to make sure I was doing it right. I found this blog which revealed her...um...struggles with this baking method and realized I had put in twice as much batter as I needed. I removed the batter, put the cans on a pan just in case and crossed my fingers.

Success. Here's what they looked like after about 25 minutes in the oven and the all-important 10 minutes of cooling in the cans.

We took a Downton Abbey break and celebrated/mourned the final episode with two pots of tea and petits fours.  This just about made Liz's birthday perfect.

After Downton Abbey the girls decorated the cakes by slicing them horizontally and filling each layer with whipped cream and fresh raspberries.  Here Liz is also getting candles ready to put in the birthday board made by her Great-Great Grandfather.

Liz's favorite color these days is orange so we also got carnations yesterday and dyed them orange with food coloring in the water. Magic!

Here's her orange birthday table with the fun table runner I whipped up.

We wrapped her gifts in orange as well.

Gifts for a 14 year old are hard--we gave her a kit of Smash Book materials, some fashion/sewing books, and a Vogue poster--perfect.

Here's the cake on the birthday board.

Liz agrees that it was the most perfect birthday ever!