My Very American 4th of July

I spent the 4th of July week-end at the countryside, in the Catskills. An extremely relaxing week-end during which I literally ate, baked, read, took pictures and slept all the time. Yap, I slept a lot and no, it wasn't bad at all. We had pic-nics and long walks in the woods, we watched the fireworks from this tiny dock on the Echo lake and did lots and lots of cooking. My new favorite friend Margaret and I took part to a pie contest at the Club House, we baked homemade American flag inspired cupcakes. We didn't win, they actually turned out to be pretty ugly...but it was fun making them anyway. Oh, and we also experimented this strawberry lemonade which turned out to be a little (too much) bitter, nobody even wanted to taste it so in the end we had it mixed with rhum for drinks, "Sixers" as they call them around here (and guess what? at this point everybody loved it). On the way back, we made a pit-stop at the Riverside Creamery, this ice-cream place in Port Jervis- the closest town in sight, for a gigantic chocolate chip mint & coconut almond joy ice-cream. It truly was the perfect conclusion to the week-end. Heavenly....SO yummy. Says who that the best gelato is made in Italy? ;-)