St. Patrick's Day Dinner (a day late)

I decided (on the spur of the moment) to invite Mom & Dad over for a St. Paddy's Day boiled dinner of corned beef, cabbage, red potatoes, carrots. This was about 10:00 a.m.

I had to do a quick dining tablescape as my table was bare. *gasp!* It is rare thing in my house not to have the dining table set. Last week I removed everything so I could use it to hold my cutting mat to cut fabric for the border I am working on. Using the table was much easier than getting down on the floor to cut fabric.

During my little shopping spree yesterday, I bought a new gold tablecloth. I pulled it out of the bag, ironed it and threw it down. In honor of St. Patrick, I used green dishes and a green vase to hold the flowers DH brought home this morning. He also bought a handful of lottery tickets. At his suggestion, I put one at each place setting so that we can rub them off after dinner to see if the luck of the Irish is with us. That will be fun.

I had recently ripped a recipe out of a magazine for a carrot cake roll. I had all of the ingredients on hand, so I made that while DH was grocery shopping (ya gotta love a man that grocery shops for you!)

It doesn't look too bad considering what a time I had removing it from the baking pan to roll it up. I lifted it out with the wax paper that was under it and darned if the paper didn't give way and the cake sort of fell to the counter and cracked into about 4 pieces. You have to remove it from the pan while it is still warm so you can roll it easier -- very tricky to do! You roll it up into a clean dish towel dusted with powdered sugar and leave it to cool completely. I did this even though it was quite broken. After it was cool and I unrolled it, it was still just as broken up (I guess I thought it would magically go back together). I decided to just go ahead and put the cream cheese frosting on it and roll it back up. I figured the frosting would hold it together and I was very happy that it did just that.

Don't know what it will taste like, but at least it held together. Boy, I am having baking difficulties lately (loyal readers might remember that I had to trash the last from-scratch cake I made).

So my break time is over. Back to the kitchen to clean up the cake mess.

I will let you know how the dinner turned out.

Update:
The cake was quite good despite all the problems.
The corned beef was disappointing - too tough.
Nobody won a cent on the lottery tickets. Darn!


All in all, though, we had an nice time with my parents.