Nothing works for me for changing background of menu options in android

Question

I tried couple of techniques to change the background of my menu options (default is black and I have to change it), but nothing worked for me. I am using min sdk 11.

Two approaches that I used:

First) Changing in onCreateOptionsMenu function:

@Override
public boolean onCreateOptionsMenu(Menu menu) {
    // TODO Auto-generated method stub
    super.onCreateOptionsMenu(menu);
    MenuInflater inflater = new MenuInflater(getApplicationContext());
    inflater.inflate(R.menu.options_menu, menu);
    setMenuBackground();
    return true;
}

/*IconMenuItemView is the class that creates and controls the options menu 
 * which is derived from basic View class. So We can use a LayoutInflater 
 * object to create a view and apply the background.
 */
protected void setMenuBackground(){
    getLayoutInflater().setFactory( new Factory() {

        @Override
        public View onCreateView ( String name, Context context, AttributeSet attrs ) {

            if ( name.equalsIgnoreCase( "com.android.internal.view.menu.IconMenuItemView" ) ) {

                try { // Ask our inflater to create the view
                    LayoutInflater f = getLayoutInflater();
                    final View view = f.createView( name, null, attrs );
                    /* 
                     * The background gets refreshed each time a new item is added the options menu. 
                     * So each time Android applies the default background we need to set our own 
                     * background. This is done using a thread giving the background change as runnable
                     * object
                     */
                    new Handler().post( new Runnable() {
                        public void run () {
                            view.setBackgroundResource( R.drawable.my_gradient);
                        }
                    } );
                    return view;
                }
                catch ( InflateException e ) {}
                catch ( ClassNotFoundException e ) {}
            }
            return null;
        }
    });
}

}

Second) Changing in styles.xml

<style name="Theme_MyStyled" parent="AppBaseTheme">
   <item name="android:panelFullBackground">@drawable/my_gradient</item>
</style>

My drawable is:

<?xml version="1.0" encoding="utf-8"?>
<shape xmlns:android="http://schemas.android.com/apk/res/android" android:shape="rectangle" >
  <gradient android:startColor="#990000ff" android:centerColor="#99800000" android:endColor="#99FFD485" android:angle="270" />
</shape>

Can someone tell how can it work for me? Thanks in advance..