so, it looks like you guys are all in love with the idea of mint green chairs!

just kidding.  luckily, i did zero painting this weekend because i spent it in dallas for an annual girls' weekend.  (first year was aspen, then sedona, duck, and then we took a year off).  except we sort of dropped the ball on planning and my mother-in-law and i were the only ones to participate.  but!  it was a great weekend and so relaxing to just head to the in-laws' house and not worry about, well, anything.

between eating lots of delicious things (including dinner at samar, my favorite of the weekend), shopping (cole haan outlet!) and spa-ing, we managed to bake the traditional cake-we-would-not-attempt-alone.

this year it was, dun dun dunnnn... king cake!  this is the first mardi gras that we haven't been in louisiana or sean hasn't worked for a louisianian, so, i hadn't even had a slice yet.  king cake has a reputation of being time consuming and difficult to make (it seems anyway).

challenge accepted!  (last year we made the heaven and hell cake and it was going to be tough to top)

i apologize for the recent overload of instagram tweets.  plus, it's hard to autofocus after a few glasses of champagne.

we used the emeril recipe linked above and added a cinnamon pecan filling.  it did take sort of forever with all the rising time but it wasn't really hard.



i got home to upload my photos and they sort of went like this: 87 pictures of the king cake, us with the king cake, us eating the king cake, a blurry picture of a belly dancer.

if that's not indication of an awesome weekend, i don't know what is.