Today is Luna birthday.
Will she have any surprises through the day ?

Write down a comment on this post and wish her a nice birthday ;-)

Organization

Wish come true

As she organized a surprised party for my own birthday last year, I decide to do the same for her. She actually told me long time ago that she dreamed of a birthday party on the beach with a giant pizza cooked on a wood fire. Back then it sounded like a good idea. However I never really thought about how to do that until a few weeks ago.

I somehow remembered her wish and decided to start organizing early (what a change !). Invinting random friends was a piece of cake. It just needed a bit of privacy violation and mass mailing to notice lots of people quickly. As her birthday was on a Friday this year, it was just perfect to throw a party. That was definitely the easiest part.

Wood fire cooked pizza

Here we go. How am I supposed to cook a pizza on a wood fire at the beach ? I had a look on the net to see if anybody would have done this kind of extreme condition cooking. Even though I found some funny cooking way for pizza, I couldn’t find anything about real camping fire. Reading articles I noticed how everybody emphases on high temperature issue. That means we would definitely need an oven (or sort of) to rise temperature. What sounded like a good idea quickly began to seem kind of hard to do.

A friends of mine suggested me to use a barrel lying across the fire. Problem is the right sized barrel is pretty much impossible to find. It gave me ideas however and off I went to ask help to my uncle. He is a mechanical guy and together we bended two aluminum plates to create a portable oven. It looked promising but I had no opportunities to test it before the party. Risky !

So I eventually had to buy refractory stones to be (kind of) sure to (hopefully) have high temperature in the oven.

Double barbecue

Meanwhile Luna started worrying about her party. She decided to invite her friends for a barbecue on the beach (that’s original !). Hopefully she planned it on Saturday so I said that was totally good idea (especially on Saturday). I still had to send a mail to all the guys I invited to warn them that they would be invited to a second fake barbecue the day after. Some of them rejected Luna’s invitation so she wasn’t really sure about barbecue after all.

Anyway I still had to organize two barbecue at once. What would happen if someone misunderstand and come on Saturday instead of Friday ? What if someone asks Luna what’s going on with two barbecues for one birthday ? That was pretty stressful actually, but luckily nobody made any mistakes I know of and the secret was well kept until the very last moment.

D-Day

I had a day off that day. Not to sleep in, but to wake up as usual and go to my father’s place (pretending to go to work of course) to prepare everything for pizza. We cut, sliced and mashed for a few hours before I could have a short rest. Unfortunately the weather brought me new worries. Since we didn’t see the sun for at least two days. Not only was it cold, but it was also really cloudy. Should we give up the beach, and not fully make the dream come true ? One more time invitees received emails to annouce that the party place changed. We would party at my father’s place, so we could have a roof in case of rain (and have an real oven).

Luna received delivered flowers about one o’clock. She got surprised when she noticed the delivery guy was actually me as I was supposed to be at work. We spend noon together, trying one more time to dye her hair in red. She then started to get ready to go out for dinner as it is her birthday.

Driving to a presumed restaurant I told her we miss a printed map and we can’t reach the restaurant without it. What a nice excuse to drop by my father place to quickly print a map. It didn’t sound too much weird as I quite often do this kind of stuff. When we arrived at my father’s place she obviously noticed many cars parked in front of his house. I said that was my father’s invitees I told her about earlier.

We parked our car and she went straight to the garage because she was supposed to quickly look for some barbecue tools for next day barbecue while I was going to print the map. Of course everybody was waiting in the dark in the garage. So when she opened the door, she heard a loud “Surprise!”.

Pizza results

Everybody (myself included) was quite wondering about pizzas. We actually managed to cook three pizzas in our special oven ! Clearly not enough for thirty peoples but we luckily could use a real oven in parralel so people didn’t have to starve all evening ;-)

Anyway I had great fun organizing all that. Hopefully people had as much as me partying.

So, what’s for next year ? ;)