On birthday pie and surprise parties

Brant is a pie guy. As in, he hates cake. We did not have a Groom's Cake at our wedding as it would just have been the bride eating it. :) It's one of the greatest sources of contention in our marriage, but after almost ten years, I'm accepting the fact that he will just never love cake as much as I do...

So every year I do a pie for his birthday... which was easy in the States with my nifty apple-peeler-corer (and with bags of frozen fruit at the grocery store!) Here it's a bit more of a hassle... and I am not a pie fan at all, so I hate all the work for something I won't eat... sorry to be selfish, Babe. :)

So this year to celebrate Brant's birthday, I decided to try a Key Lime Pie.... I found a really easy recipe on The Pioneer Woman's website and since limes grow like weeds here (but not lemons, how weird is that?) I figured why not?

The boys helped make the pie... it was great fun and would have been really easy to whip together if I didn't have so much "help" :):)

Elijah squeezed limes.... LOTS and LOTS of limes.... (no, I don't have a juicer, and YES it would be helpful.)


Caleb was in charge of the crust... which meant he broke up cookies and put them in the chopper attachment to my blender...


It's a small attachment so only could handle a few cookies at a time; this particular recipe called for a really thick crust to off-set the really rich filling. By the end of the process, Caleb was able to fill the container, shut it, get it on the blender correctly, grind the cookies and then take the whole thing apart and empty the cookies into the baggie. He was SO proud of himself! I was sad to see how much he's grown up. :(


And Ezra's contribution was to cheer us on....



The only hitch in the whole process was that Brant came home early from a flight and we had to scramble to hide the pie! :) But it turned out SO yummy. At first the boys were upset there would be no cake (and icing!) at the party (I was too!) but by the time they finished their first bites, they all said they wanted "Lime Pie" for their birthdays too!

With the pie finished, we set about to finish getting ready for Brant's "party" - which involved wrapping the one little present I had managed to pick up for him. The boys were CRUSHED - as in, were crying - that there were not more presents. (Granted he did get some paper "presents" in envelopes from America, but those totally don't count in little boy eyes!) But buying presents here is SO hard... what I did get a friend had picked up for me on vacation off island.

Anyways, they got over it and decided to do an elaborate "treasure hunt" for the one present.... it basically was all 3 of them leading Brant around the house and showing where they had hidden "clues" (which were pictures they had drawn for Brant) until all the clues were found - then they showed him where they had hidden the present....




After the "treasure hunt" the boys wanted to have a "surprise party." They have a Corduroy book where Corduroy's friends throw him a surprise party and we must have read that story 3 times a day the week before Brant's birthday. The only trouble was they have never been to a surprise party before and totally didn't get the concept.... they wanted to hide all over the house and then have Brant come find them and yell "surprise!" when he found them!

Anyways, we finally got around to dinner! Brant grilled some imported sausages I had bought from a fundraiser and then we got PIE! It was way yum and I will definitely do it again... maybe even for my own birthday. :)



Happy Birthday, Babe! I love you!