Kate's Birthday Wine Tasting

Dress: Lace Print Dress from Lucie Lu via Gwynnie Bee (click link to get a free month & help me earn a free garment for a month)

Necklace/Bracelet/Earring: Vintage parure by Robert DeMario

I wore this stunning emerald dress to Kate's birthday wine tasting. Why did I send this dress back? Gorgeous! It was a great fit, but I'm glad I sized up as this dress runs a tad small. The waist was a bit strange as it fell in-between empire & natural waist, but it still worked somehow. The neckline was high enough on this dress to make it work appropriate. I LOVED the deep green & the lace print. This jewelry parure was one of the first things I ever purchased from ebay back in 1996 & this is only the second time I've ever worn it. I thought it added a touch of glamour & made this dress more evening wearable. 

Kate is a collector of wine. These are only the reds she opened, there was another table with 4 whites. Once upon a time Super Boo & I used to do wine tastings at our house where everyone brought bottles that were $15 & under and we bagged them and gave each wrapper unique names, such as: Big Black Sex Cop (Six Feet Under reference), I Can Really Taste The Pea-ness (Iron Chef reference), Libidinous Lesbionics (Daily Show reference), & Who's Your Daddy? Now wine tasting is *serious business*. Not that I entirely mind. /tangent. All of the wine was YUM. My rating scale goes from YUM to YUCK. Kate has excellent taste in wine!

I most often make the girlie carrot cake for her birthday, but she requested chocolate red wine cake this year & sent me 2 recipes. I made them both. One was from Smitten Kitchen & the other was from Food & Wine. They were both delicious, but I liked the Smitten Kitchen one *slightly* more...plus, it had thee most tasty whipped cream topping made with mascarpone...I don't think I'll ever make whipped cream any other way! I doubled the recipe so we could use it on both cakes. 

Kate looked adorable, yet I have no good photos of her to share. So I'm not. She wore a red/black maxi sweater dress from Igigi.