Valentine's Day

I have to say this was one of my favorite and probably the best Valentines Day that I have spent with Mike. Now I know I have always been a hopeless romantic and wanted some grand gesture on Valentines Day and probably had grandiose and unrealistic expectations. Especially considering that Mike does not even consider Valentines Day to be a real Holiday, and our past experiences on this date have ended less than stellar. Maybe it was the fact that we had celebrated my best friends wedding the evening before and romance was in the air. Or the fact that it was a very low key day, and I had no ridiculous romantic expectations of the day but it ended up being a perfect Valentines Day. I think this was a good bar to set!

When I saw on The Manor's website randomly one day that they had a Valentine's Day dinner package, I eagerly asked Mike if we could go and he graciously agreed to take me. Little did we know though that by the time Sunday night rolled around on Valentine's Day we'd had more than our fair share of delicious meals that weekend, I didn't know how we would ever eat more and a big dinner like at The Manor. In fact Mike had steak 3 nights in a row that weekend!

The Manor was of course as perfect as I had remembered it from the last time. The atmosphere was perfect once again for a romantic dinner for two. We were seated right next to the pianist and were serenaded throughout our delicious meal.

Before our first course, we were once again brought out a special started prepared by the chef. We had the butternut squash soup again, very hot, sweet, and drank it from espresso cups. Along with it was served this red pepper mouse. It was almost like a cheese, it was so light and airy and had all of the taste of a delicious pepper. I liked that! Then for my meal I began with the caesar salad for my first course, and Mike was his favorite lobster bisque soup again, a favorite of his from our last trip. I tried it again and have to say it was absolutely delicious. After that it was onto a champagne sorbet, served in this unique individual ice sculpture box that lit up underneath it. For our main courses, I had the fillet mignon and mike had the surf and turf - I even tasted Mike's lobster! Both served with mashed potatoes and fresh vegetables.

By this point I was absolutely stuffed and couldn't even finish my meal and we still had dessert coming. Mike ordered the red velvet sweetheart cake and for me pavloa, which is a toasted coconut meringue shell, with passion fruit and sorbet. I had never had pavloa before, I was surprised that is actually quite a hard shell. I was so full by this point that I only ate some of the fruit and sorbet off the top which was more than plenty for me. I will say that Mike's chocolate cake was absolutely incredible. It had dark chocolate and raspberry ganache with white chocolate butter cream and fresh raspberries. I hope we can get a wedding cake like that!

To end the evening I got one long stem red rose when we were leaving but even better than that my Valentine bought me a beautiful Valentine's Day card which made my day!