No cake left unturned

Bill surprised me on our anniversary.

We went to eat at one of our favorite restaurants (it didn't hurt that we had been given a gift card to use). We were seated at our table and the waitress handed us our menus.

I was looking at the specials, and the wine, and the main dishes. I glanced up at Bill.

He had this odd grin on his face.

I smiled back.

I kept looking over the menu, trying to decide what I wanted. Did the shrimp fresca sound better than the crab cakes?

I glanced back at Bill to see if he had made a decision.

He still had that odd grin plastered to his face.

I smiled back.

Then I asked him if he was okay. Maybe he was having a stroke and I wasn't recognizing the signs.

He pointed to the top of the menu and said, "Look!"

That was when I realized it said, "Our staff would like to wish Bill and Emily a very Happy Anniversary!"

"Oh!", I exclaimed.

That was what he was waiting for; me to notice this wonderful gesture he had made. That was very sweet. I felt very special.

Even if the people next to us were wearing ripped blue jeans and tank tops and their hair looked as though it hadn't been combed for several weeks.

Then he had mentioned that he had already taken care of dessert.

Halfway through my salad, I said, "Do we have to have dessert?"

Twelve years and Bill couldn't believe those words came out of my mouth. (It was Sunday, so we had already eaten Big Sunday Breakfast.)

After the waiter had cleared the plates from our main course, I saw him walk back out with a cake.

It looked like the top of a wedding cake.

I looked at Bill and said, "A cake!?"

Sure enough, one of the people in his networking group is a baker. He had asked her to make this cake.

He had wanted it to look like our wedding cake. But he couldn't find the picture, so he told her to do her best.

It was topped with two strawberries, one was dipped in dark chocolate and decorated to look like a tuxedo while the other had been dipped in white chocolate and looked like the lace on a wedding gown (to my friends who are better at taking pictures of their food than I am, I had already eaten the "tuxedo" strawberry when I thought to take the picture, my apologies).

Look at the delicious, chocolate layers. Yum!

The waiter very kindly boxed up the rest of the cake and we have been eating it ever since.

After our dinner tonight (we just ate salads), we pulled the cake out of the fridge. Bill asked if I wanted to use paper plates. I told him, no. We were going to finish this thing off, so why waste plates?

Eventually we tipped the cake over onto its side so that we could get smaller (normal) sized bites.

Here is the result!