I hope all my fellow United Statesians had a great Independence Day. Ours was spend eating (ok gorging) and visiting with family and friends at my parents’ house. We had four types of ribs (tandoori, brown sugar rub, barbecue, and Tony’s*), baked beans, corn on the cob, homemade bread, potato salad, chips and dip, and enough sweets to take out an entire hospital wing of diabetics.

My contribution to the gluttony was Bakerella’s 14-layer cake only instead of 14 layers, I made it with 13 layers to represent the thirteen original colonies (har!). I considered trying to come up with a variation with blueberry and strawberry fillings and white icing instead of the chocolate, but decided I didn’t have time for divorce proceedings, what with the holiday and all.

My youngest sister Rachel made the above totally adorable cookies and the cake pops below.

The only thing lacking from Frank Capra-esque festivities were fireworks. We, unfortunately, had to leave before sunset to get home before the fireworks (it’s a whole big traffic fiasco thing) and apparently we missed the memo wherein the city decided to move the fireworks down the river a hundred yards, so instead of being able to watch them from our yard, they were directly behind the trees and all we could see was the rising smoke. Fail.

PS This post was a lot more verbose and hilarious but my (current) webhost is experiencing difficulties and I completely lost the original copy of this post and had to rewrite it…while trying to suppress the bloodlust, so it lost some of its sparkle in the rewrite.

More photos can be seen at my Flickr photostream.

*A Louisiana staple. Most people would give up oxygen before they would give up Tony’s.