Trip to Pittsburgh, Ebay's Birthday Party

I went to Pittsburgh for spring carnival. It was awesome going back, seeing everyone, and eating the food that I missed. I still hold that Korea Garden in Pittsburgh has some of the best Korean food in America. You'd think it'd be easy to find a replacement in SF, but I haven't been able to so far.

Anyways, while we were there, it happened to be Inbae's birthday. He's becoming an old man (and acting like one too). He turned 25 (26 in Korean age), so Christine and Angela came up with the idea of making his cake a quarter. So I baked a red velvet cake. This was my first cake, and I took it out about 10 times to check to see if it was cooked through, but it came out really, really well. No one seemed to know what a red velvet cake was (I guess it's a Southern thing) but everyone seemed to really like it, especially the frosting which was a mix of butter, cream cheese, and white chocolate. The recipe I used is here: http://allrecipes.com/Recipe/Red-Velvet-Cake-IV/Detail.aspx

Angela decorating the cake...


So I made the cake and icing. Angela and Christine assembled the cake and put the icing onit. I was pretty incredulous of how it'd turn out, but after 2 hours of hard labor, I can say they did an awesome job with the cake. One mistake you can see above is putting on the candles before finishing the cake completely...juts silly.


As you can tell it looks awesome so far.


Last finishing touches. You can see all the attempted drawings of ebay's big head on the paper.


Just awesome


Jay and Christine lighting all 25 candles.


Ebay's so happy.


Drawn to actual proportion.


And ebay became even tastier...


Playing with his girlfriend's hair???



The cake: so red, so delicious. Annlouise would be proud.


This is a really good party dish. It's lil smokies and some secret sauce. If you don't know the sauce, you'll love the dish. If you do, you'll question my sanity (recipe's actually from my mom and who knows where she got it from). At any rate, I guarentee most people like it.

Basically you take a package of lil' smokies. Put them in a bowl of water and into the microwave for about 4 minutes. Then drain the water to remove some of the excess fat. Now to make the sauce take about 1/2 a bottle of grape jelly and 1/3 a bottle of yellow mustard. Put it in a pan on medium high and cook for a few minutes. Put in the little smokies and adjust the sauce as you see fit.

I know the sauce sounds disgusting, but it's really friggin' good.


A pic of all the asian party goers.

Party was pretty sweet. I was in a rush, so I didn't take pics of me making the cake, but if you've neve rmade one, the red velvet cake recipe I used is super simple, and it came out amazing. I'll try to make some other cake soon and take some pics along the way.