Busy weekend!  I spent most of Saturday ice fishing with my sister.  Or rather, she fished while I tried to keep my feet warm in gale force winds by a fire…  and we shall never speak of that again.

Today, however, was a different story!

John and I planned out our annual Mardi Gras dinner party.  I tried my hand at making a king cake for the first time.  It is a yeast dough bread with filling inside.  The recipe I made gave us 2 cakes, so I did them differently.  Here is the dough all rolled out and spread with filling.

One cake I did with a cream cheese and strawberry jam filling (which I made today) and the other was a pecan praline filling.  This was then rolled up jelly roll style and made into a ring:

Then baked up!

Then the best part is the colored glaze to make it festive!

I couldn’t wait to try it!

We got out the beads for the party:

My mother provided the masks:

Rare sighting of my dad being silly:

On the menu for tonight- shrimp and crab etouffe!  John made this.  He rocks!

We also had some cajun chicken strips.  Just breaded seasoned chicken cutlets, really.  Plus green beans with a bit of bacon! (Everything is better with bacon, right?)

And some cornbread muffins, courtesy of my sister. Normally I don’t have a giant plate like this, but it was the one I ended up with, so the food is all spread out LOL!

After dinner it was game time!

Just a tiny bit of alcohol in some coffee

Then it was time for the awesome King Cake!

Very good!  It is a yeast dough, so this was very much like a danish.   I think it was pretty successful, although we have a lot of cake left over LOL!  Definitely need to put a lot of this in the freezer.

Now, we are hunkered down for *another* winter storm.  Heavy snow and blowing winds right now and up to a foot is expected by tomorrow morning.  Eeek!  Maybe I’ll have another piece of king cake!