2011 Tea Party

I love throwing tea parties.  Mostly because it gives me an opportunity to make fun cute food and try new recipes.  Some of my favorite things to make are found below:

Fruit flowers on a stick - I cut watermelon, cantelope and kiwi with flower cookie cutters and stacked them with a blueberry or blackberry on top and secured them with as fancy tooth pick.

My Mother-in-law and Niece made some cute cucumber dill sandwiches and cut a flower out of a cucumber with a sprig of dill for decoration on the top and also brought the decorative cucumber/tomato salad.

Parmesan crisp bowls with an romaine lettuce, mandarin oranges and candied almond salad with vinaigrette dressing

Blue cheese stuffed olives with the blue cheese pecan dip from Trader Joes

Caprese salad on a stick (mozzarella balls, cherry tomatoes and basil) drizzled with olive oil and balsamic vinegar

Veggie bundles tied with chives served with sweet pepper bowls filled with ranch dressing and garnished with dill

Shrimp salad served in herb coated phyllo cups (Paula Deen's recipe)

Antipasto squewers (roasted red pepper, olive, cheese)

Homemade lemon curd and Devonshire cream

Mini shortbreads and mini scones

Fourth of July Fun

This year for 4th of July I decided to do some fun things with food.  Since I love doing creative things and had to make food for the party I figured I could combine the two activities to get the best of both worlds.  I made a red white and blue fruit salad. For the red I used watermelon, cherries, strawberries, & raspberries. For the blue, I used blueberries and for the white I used Asian pears and Crenshaw melon.  I found an image on Pinterest for inspiration. http://witandwhistle.com/2011/07/05/cookie-cutter-fruit-salad/   Cindy helped me cut out all the watermelon stars with small cookie cutters and I cut tiny stars out of the Crenshaw melon with the inside cutter from a Lintzer cookie cutter. I have to say I think it came out pretty cute! Then to top it off I found a cute idea on Pinterest for making watermelon and blueberry wands http://weelicious.com/2012/06/29/magical-fruits-wands-for-your-fourth-of-july-celebration/, so I added 3 wands to try and make it look like fireworks. When I do it again I'll have to put some small white stars in between all the blueberries on the wands.

Since our family loves jello I found a cute idea for cut glass jello stars at http://gimmesomeoven.com/stained-glass-jello/.  Everyone loved them.  Next time I have to find a blue or red plate to put them on. All the extra pieces left over from the cut outs I put in a side bowl and called jello confetti. ;o)

Whit's Anteater Graduation Cake

Our friends Cindy and Dave's daughter Whitney just graduated from UC Irvine. She enjoys going to the beach and surfing so Cindy and I made a beach cake with Anteaters. It was a lot of fun although we have to admit that making anteaters was a bit more difficult than we expected! It was a lot of fun making ants, chocolate chip cookies, grapes, & a turkey sandwich as well as shells and sand dollars to scatter on the beach along with a cute crab!

Our nephew Shariff is very good at Basketball so for his recent birthday I made him a basketball cake.  I had a round cake pan for the ball and made a backstop with gum tape and a 9 x 13 pan.  The basketball was a bit unstable on the backstop so I ended up pushing chopsticks through the ball to stabilize it for our trip to the restaurant.

Emma's Farm Birthday Cake

For Emma's 1st birthday I decided it would be fun to make a farm cake with barnyard animal cupcakes. I had a cute roll of picket fence in the closet so I pulled it out and put it around the barn cake and cupcake animals for decoration.

Easter Fun

I was inspired by the pretty jello egg pictures I saw on Pinterest and followed the link to the Tip Junkie Blog http://go.tipjunkie.com/ea/466/choosetothrive.blogspot.com/2011/04/rainbow-easter-eggs.html. You can get the jello molds from the kraft website (a few months before Easter) if you pay for shipping and handling. I found that it worked really well to use 5 molds and 5 large boxes of jello made with the evaporated milk instructions from Kraft. They were pretty easy to make and everyone seemed to like them. The milk cut some of the sweetness of jello which made them even better. :o)

Next I set out to make some Easter Egg Oreo Truffles and some Oreo Truffles made in the shape of Baby Chicks. As I was brainstorming on what to use for the feet, my creative Husband found some mini licorice rope at Cost Plus World Markets that we could pull apart into ropes of 3 and then spread out each of the ropes on one side to make feet. We used coconut coated in yellow food coloring for the head feathers and rolled out an orange Starburst candy and cut it into small triangles for the beak. They ended up taking a little more time than I originally planned so we made a bunch of colored egg shaped Oreo Truffles with different sprinkles on the top as well.  My daughter even got into the action and helped apply sprinkles to the eggs.

Emma's Monkeys Jumping on the Bed Cake

Emma's favorite song when she was almost 2 was "No More Monkeys Jumping on the Bed" so for her 2nd birthday I made her a Monkey's Jumping on the Bed Cake complete with Monkeys Sleeping in Their Bed Cupcakes.  I found a really cute example that helped me shape the monkeys.

http://www.flickriver.com/photos/genamex/3554971982/

The monkeys were made ahead of time out of fondant and royale icing and the pillows were fondant over marshmellows.  Since they were made out of chocolate fondant Emma tried to steal a few in the days prior to her party and was successful at eating one of them. :O)

  

Emma's Ladybug Party

This past year for our daughter's birthday we decided to have a ladybug theme with a few butterflies thrown in for fun.  I had so much fun searching online for great ideas for ladybug and butterfly shaped food to come up with many fun ideas for the kids. 

I found some strawberry ladybugs at the following site
http://learningdevelopmentactivities.blogspot.com/2010/06/ladybug-strawberry.html By the time I made the heads and the bodies I tried putting on the legs but decided it was too much effort.

I found some cute ham sandwiches at this blog but decided I could do something similar with peanut butter and jelly sandwiches.  http://www.cutefoodforkids.com/2010/11/ladybug-sandwich.html

From the same website, I found some cute ladybugs made out of Bon Bell cheese.  They were a little harder than I expected but fun none the less.  http://www.cutefoodforkids.com/2010/11/babybel-cheese-sure-is-one-healthy.html

 I found a cute idea for butterflies made out of grapes and orange slices from this blog.  http://almostunschoolers.blogspot.com/2011/05/orange-slice-butterflies.html. 

Then for the cake.  I asked Emma what she wanted and she said a ladybug cake - strawberry flavor.  So, she got lady bug cupcakes with ladybugs made out of fondant on a green daisy cake.  She even helped cut out the fondant leaves for the border around the bottom edge of the cake.

  

We had to throw in a few cute decorations to go along with the theme and bought some red take out boxes from Party City that I drew black spots on and filled with some sparkly ladybug stickers and tatoos as well as other prizes.

Overall it was sure fun to plan this party, I am already looking ahead to next year.

Thanksgiving Turkey and Pumpkin Cheese Balls

Well I always thought it would be fun to have a Food Blog and so I'm going to just do it!  It is a little late (or early) for Thanksgiving in April but I figure it will be fun to start somewhere.....

I had to bring an appetizer for Thanksgiving Dinner.  I searched the internet for ideas that would be yummy but also fun to make and came across a really cute turkey cheeseball at the following site http://www.thummprints.net/2010/12/ive-returned.html.  I used blue cheese with peppercorns for the eyes and chopped pecans and pecans for the feathers along with crackers for the tail feathers.

For the pumpkin cheese ball I ground up Cheese Its and some chopped nuts and used celery for the stem with cucumber peal for the leaves.