Barbacoa & awesome Western Cupcakes and Cake!

[note - I just did another marathon post. About 4 or 5 new entries...Please scroll down to see the latest in this blog - including the epic Ethnic Food Fair post]

This past weekend, the department celebrated the retirement of one of our colleagues and friends. Bert and I hosted the shindig at our place. We had it all decked out with bandannas ($1 at the Dickie's store) and various western motifs throughout the house. We found two cowboy hats at Bert's house (his brother's), along with a vintage bolo tie from the 80's. We even used TC's toy horses as decoration. My friend is a Modern Day Cowboy so the theme was Western with Mexican food. I had to ask his wife and daughters what his favorite things were. They came up with some interesting suggestions too. I tried to follow through on as many as I could, like his love of Mexican food, lemon and coconut flavored cake and so on...

See the cupcakes below (courtesy of the very talented and charming Jenny of the blog Foray into Food)? Those are little fondant horshoes on top of two different flavors of cupcakes. The darker one is Chocolate with peanut and caramel filling (the peanuts were halved and were delicious). The frosting was peanut butter drizzled with caramel and topped with more peanuts. The lighter cupcake was Lemon with Coconut with Buttercream frosting topped with coconut! To die for! Everyone loved them! JW if you're reading this, well done!
Here's his cake. Jenny did a really great job with this! The topper is a cowboy hat (rice krispies, I believe, that she molded into a hat shape and covered with fondant). The top tier is vanilla cake with vanilla frosting. She thought a plain flavor would work best since the other flavors were all over the place. The yellow frosting you see is supposed to be "hay. The fondant decorations are rope and a horshoe. The bottom tier is a cow print with the words "Happy Trails". The green stuff is supposed to be grass. I don't know if you can see it, but when I transferred this cake to the cake pedestal, I smudged one of the cow spots and the grass near the bottom! Oops! This cake was pretty heavy for its compact size...
Here's a back view of the cake. As you can see, the top tier is made of blue fondant and is meant to be blue jeans. There is also a cute smiling horse on there!
Awww... and oh yeah, the bottom layer is carrot cake. Let me tell you that this carrot cake was one of the best I've ever had and I am not a fan of carrot cake. All of these funky flavors are actual flavors that my friend likes (according to his wife and daughters). This carrot cake was so moist and flavorful and chock full of nuts, raisins, actual carrot shreds, and I believe cranberries. One guest said it was almost as good, if not better than her wedding cake.
These are little peanut candies (Mazapan); they are quite powdery. They remind me of peanut flavored polvoron but these are Mexican candies.
Everyone in the department pitched in for this potluck dinner based on the theme of Mexican food. The salad was the "Fiesta Salad" from Costco, which comes with lettuce, chipotle ranch dressing, chips, and cheese. We used about two bags of it.
We all pitched in money for the main dish, which was Barbacoa. Our secretary made the barbacoa with two kinds of meat. She also made the sauce from scratch. This was a ginormous pot by the way! This smelled so good in my house! I snuck a little taste before the party even began! Man, our secretary can cook! There was enough meat to feed about 30 people (although about 23 or 24 actually showed up).
Fixings for the meat - chopped red onions and cilantro. Because my bowl had a third spot empty, I chopped up some green onions.
Here's the lone Filipino thing on the menu - Lechon! Remember my nephew's party? I had Bert order several pounds of the Lechon from Lola's Grill. None of the party goers ever had this before. I thought it was a bit burnt, but it was still very delicious, especially with the sarsa (sauce). The Mexicans who were there said it was like their carnitas but with the skin. The Lechon was quite popular that night...
Although this isn't a Mexican dish (more Tex-Mex), I thought this would be fun to make. I had some the week before at my friend's house....I went ahead and made this black bean and corn salad (recipe courtesy of Robsessed friend's brother in law). It's black beans with corn, diced red bell pepper, diced red onion, diced jicama, salt, pepper, cumin (which I didn't put in), and Creamy Cilantro Dressing. I couldnt' find the El Torito brand, but my friend found the Trader Joe's version. I made this the night before so the flavors could meld. This was gone by night's end.
Because I'm anal, I transferred mostly everything to my own serving ware, with a few pieces borrowed from my friends. There is Spanish rice (nice oval casserole courtesy of Robsessed!). The rose pink lid you see in the foreground is part of the comal (tortilla warmer).
Another co-worker (actually her mom) made beans - these were also excellent. None of that smashed refried stuff.
The cupcakes on my little cupcake tree:
The stacked desserts display. From the top, my cheesecake lemon bars, then we have Mexican wedding cookies (kind of like tea cakes - butter cookies with ground pecans covered with powdered sugar), which I haven't made in about five years. I made them because my co-worker who is retiring said that my cookies reminded him of his mother's (she had passed away several years ago). I thought that was the best compliment ever! A former co-worker brought brownines and the bottom tier was bought from North Park Produce. It was a pastry ring filled with cream cheese, coconut, and nuts. Not pictured is another co-worker's flan. Also not pictured were the drinks - Margaritas! We also polished off the leftover vodka from my birthday party last month (no more Grey Goose or Russian Standard).
Mixed fruits:
Man oh man, that was a lot of food! There were still leftovers so I ended up bringing it to work today. I brought the meat in a crock pot where the mouthwatering smell wafted through the air infusing our offices with the meaty and spicy fragrance of barbacoa. I brought the fruit salad, the sides (well, the rice was all gone though), and the leftover cake where it was enjoyed by several who were not able to make it. It was such a fun time having everyone get together. There's less than two weeks of school left and after that, he's officially retired! Lucky him! I'm really happy for him but also sad to see him go because he was one of my early mentors when I first started in this profession. Anyways, we all had a great time this weekend sharing each other's company as well as good food.