Mike's Birthday Bash

To celebrate Mike's birthday, we invited a few friends over for dinner. On the menu was bruschetta with garlic bread and lumpia for appetizers, and chicken tetrazzini for the main course. It's Filipino tradition that you serve somthing with noodles for birthdays and I had a hard time coming up with something that Mike liked since he doesn't care for spaghetti and I'm a little tired of making pancit for all our get togethers. I wanted something special. Little did I realize that the menu I planned would leave me in the kitchen for hours!

I also made his birthday cake. We don't have very many choices here in Japan if you want something other than a plain sheet cake from the commissary bakery, so I scoured the internet for any ice cream cake recipes. Thank goodness for the internet! I decided on a butter pecan ice cream/yellow cake/vanilla frosting combination- Mike's favorites. The making of the cake was surprisingly easy, but the decorating- that's another story. I had a little trouble with that part, but I figured, it's the thought that counts...





After cake time was present time! Yuki and Kazuho got Mike his very own Yukata (summer kimono-like wear for guys). Mike was so excited because I had found my Yukata last week, but we haven't had a chance to go shopping for his. The girls got him a really nice one that even came with the traditional sandals.





Now that Mike and I have our very own yukatas, we still have no clue how to put them on. It was pretty comedic last week when we were trying to figure out how to put on my yukata. The directions that came with it were written in Japanese, so we googled directions. But even with an English translation, we were hopeless. So while we had our Japanese friends here, they helped us to put them on.























With the help of our friends, we looked great in our yukatas, but I'm not sure we could re-create what they did if we had to do it by ourselves.







Mike's birthday was an evening filled with food, ice cream cake, and even a little dress up. Good times...