GNI: Girl's night in

Bella doesn't have school tomorrow. I have to work Monday, but Bella is out of school, so we are having a slumber party. We are banishing her daddy to bed (which won't be a problem anyway, since he worked all night and is out playing golf now), and once Bubba is asleep it's party time. Woo-hoo! We are going to go to the store in a little while to pick up supplies - popcorn, the Tinkerbell movie, things like that. And some curlers - she wants to put curlers in her hair. She also wants to paint her toenails and put on some of my mint julip face mask. I'm actually excited, too.



It's king cake season! I love king cake:

In New Orleans' revelry and religious tradition are the ties that bind
during Mardi Gras. Thus, it's not surprising that the origin of the modern King
Cake can be traced back to the Middle Ages, when popular devotion during
Christmas turned to the Three Wise Men, or Kings, who had followed a star and
paid homage to Christ. Epiphany, the end of the Christmas celebration and the
12th night after the birth of Christ, came to be known as "Twelfth Night," a
time for pageants and giving special "King" presents to children.
Today in New Orleans, the King Cake is an oval-shaped braided coffee cake which is
decorated with cinnamon sugar in the official Mardi Gras colors – gold (for
power), green (faith), and purple (justice) – and contains a tiny plastic baby
that has replaced the coin used in medieval times. The person who gets the slice
of cake with the baby in it must host the next party; at some parties, they are
crowned king or queen. The cake, a gift shared by family, friends and
revelers alike, is eaten between the Twelfth Night and Fat Tuesday, the
beginning of Lent. However, the cake often begins appearing during
Christmas.

It's basically a big huge cinnamon roll with mardi-gras colored icing, but what's not to love about that? I had my first piece of the season yesterday, and it made me terribly happy. I used to work at a condo office on the beach, and quite a few of the condo owners were New Orleans residents who used their condos to escape the general madness of Mardi Gras. And they would bring us real, New Orleans style king cakes, from Randazzo's or Haydel's or Gambino's in the city, and they would have either a gold bead baby or, in one case, a porcelain baby inside. As opposed to the king cakes you can buy at, say, a grocery store, that come with a little plastic baby that you are supposed to stuff inside yourself - probably for liability reasons. The picture below shows a filled king cake; I prefer mine a little more traditional, with no filling. Maybe we can have some king cake at our slumber party tonight.....

We are going to do some reading on Dr. Martin Luther King, as well. I have a book that I've been saving, so I figure that can be her nightly reading tonight while we are not-slumbering at our slumber party. Hope everyone is having a lovely weekend!