Today is the day…

We had a birthday party for Esther today. Friends from church and work came over to celebrate and eat in typical House of Annie fashion. The menu included Chinese Chicken Salad, smoked Malaysian Chicken Wings, Homemade Breakfast Sausage (grilled on my WSM), beef sliders, and a few other delicious dishes prepared by our helper Jessie. Annie baked and prepared another one of her layer cakes for dessert.

Recently, Annie has been decorating her round layer cakes with a rose pattern made from slices of canned peaches. It’s so easy to do, but quite pretty. All you need is a big can of peach halves, a sharp knife, and a steady hand.

After you open the can and drain the peaches, carefully slice them into wedges using a paring knife. After you’ve frosted the cake, start laying the wedges down around the circumference of the cake.

Keep working your way around, adding peach slices in layers.

Finally when you get to the middle, you can put a couple of kiwi slices, or finish off with a really thin peach slice folded into an inverted cone. Et voilà, you’re done!

Happy Birthday to Us

Coincidentally, it’s also House of Annie’s new birthday as well!  Even though this blog was started on Blogspot back in October 2006, I consider today to be a rebirth of the House of Annie, as we’ve officially moved over to the new www.houseofannie.com domain name.

This new site looks similar to the old site, but we’ve moved some things around and upgraded some others.  Most notably, we have a great, drop-down navigation menu up at the top to help you better browse our recipes.  We have an expanded, continually updating Blogroll page now. And we’re also introducing Annie’s aStore on Amazon.com, where you can buy items that we mention on our blog.

Speaking of which, we will be introducing a new facet to the House of Annie: book reviews. Since Annie is a big reader, she’s been wanting to blog about the books she’s been reading (and they’re not all cookbooks 😉 )  We will probably keep the book reviews off of the main House of Annie subscription feed so as not to get in the way of the food talk. Other new topics will be forthcoming.

Still, we don’t want to get away from why you read House of Annie in the first place: interesting food and useful recipes.  Rest assured, we have lots of recipes to blog about, and many foodie experiences to share.  We will also revisit and update our most popular recipes of the past.

So stay tuned!  We’re so glad to be able to share our food with you dear readers.  As long as you keep coming back, we’ll keep going! 🙂

Cheers and Aloha, Annie and Nate