A big one

The husband's birthday was yesterday! :) He turned the big 3-0!

We spent the weekend doing a lot of nothing which is exactly what he wanted. I should be more specific, he spent the weekend doing a lot of nothing and I spent the weekend making sure he didn't have to do anything. :)

Friday we went out to Mellow Mushroom for dinner which is always so yummy.

Saturday morning I made bacon biscuits for the husband as he is a huge fan of bacon.
The biscuits were a hit and thanks to a little planning, I doubled the recipe and froze a bunch to make later!

Brown Sugar Bacon biscuits

Later that day we had Jennifer, Brett and Lucas over for dinner. I made beef short ribs, rosemary mashed potatoes, roasted Brussels sprouts and cake! The best part - I made the short ribs and cake Friday so I didn't have much at all to do Saturday for dinner.

The short ribs recipe turned out quite well and wasn't too challenging. The main issue is time but I followed the recommendation to let it sit overnight which makes this a terrific meal to serve when you have dinner guests! I used a different mashed potato recipe that included parsnips - I do try to add in extra vegetables whenever I can!

I love making desserts and after days of weighing the options, I chose this Dark Chocolate Salted Caramel layer cake from Annie's Eats for the birthday celebration. And man was that a good choice!

The recipe says to refrigerate it and so I took it out at dinner time to let it come to room temperature a bit. It didn't quite get there but was still good. However, Sunday we discovered that waiting about 3-4 hours for the slice of cake to truly come to room temperature makes the cake taste even better!

Thanks to wonderful packaging on one gift (the picture of the gift was on the box) and a shopping trip to start the process of picking out his other gift (a golf club), the husband didn't have anything to open from me. To make the day a little more fun, while he was at softball, I decorated the house some and wrapped his gifts from his parents and my parents. Not super amazing, but better than nothing!

I wanted to get a photo of the birthday boy but he greatly dislikes photos, so I just took one of him while he was reading my card. Something is always better than nothing! :)