Oh, Fransson!

Holiday Party Recap

 

The rescheduled holiday party went forward as planned and it seemed like everyone had a good time.  I wasn't able to find hot pink candles in time, but I did get some bright pink roses, which really looked appropriate with the various animal prints. 

 

Here you can see plates of cookies and some of the favor boxes.  I only ended up making 10 kinds this year (so about 80 dozen, which is well below my average).  The ones I haven't written about yet are the Coconut Fudge Pinwheels, for which I finally found the recipe on Martha Stewart's site.  Find it here. 

The second is my special recipe for Peanut Butter Blossoms, which is basically everyone else's recipe with more peanut butter.  These are the best, easiest cookies ever, the recipe makes five dozen cookies, and they store and freeze beautifully. 

Here is the recipe: Download Peanut Butter Blossoms

 

Here's another shot of the favor boxes and some of that fantastic sheer leopard fabric.  It's hard to see in these photos, but the boxes are tied with gold and black organdy ribbon.

 

Have you noticed the weird exposure and coloring on these photos?  They were taken at night, so I had to brighten them a bit.  This resulted in some rather 80's looking coloring, which I sort of ran with instead of away from! 

Above is a shot of the wonderfully delicious Kickball Punch, so named because I first made it to bring to kickball games.  It makes about five gallons before ice is added.  You'll want to have ice on hand though, because it is quite strong!

Kickball Punch:

• 1 Bottle Dark Rum

• 1 Bottle Light Rum

• 1 Bottle Overproof Rum (151)

• 1 Bottle Triple Sec

• 2 Liters 7-Up

• 1/2 Gallon Orange Juice

• 1 Quart Passionfruit Nectar

• 1 Quart Pineapple Juice

• 1 Cup Lemon Juice

• 1 cup Lime Juice

The party was fun, but I'm glad to have it behind me now and am looking forward to all the fun new projects I have planned for 2009.

Found: One Decorating Theme

 

Our holiday party was originally scheduled for the Saturday before Christmas but, because of the horrible weather, we had to move it to this Saturday.  Being well after Christmas and several days after New Year's Day, I was kind of struggling with how to decorate.  I really didn't want to use the more Christmas-y decorations and favor box wrapping supplies that I'd planned on, but the party didn't have another theme that I could work with.  I had settled on just sticking with plain and sophisticated until I saw the "Rockstar Stack" of scrapbooking paper.

 

Now, I will admit that I'm not into scrapbooking.  I usually stay away from that section in craft stores.  But this "Rockstar" themed paper was so over the top (lots of metallic guitars, skull and crossbones and hot pink) that I instantly loved it.  I decided on the spot that our party was going to have an 80's hair metal decorating theme.

Do you ever wonder who buys that absolutely awful fabric they always have on the clearance rack at JoAnn?  You know, the snow leopard satin with sequin accents?  Or the tiger print velvet?  Yesterday that was totally me.  I now have yards and yards of animal print fabric just waiting to be draped about.

To help with the cause, my husband busted out his collection of hair metal posters, which is really kind of amazing.  (He has a Quiet Riot poster!)  I'm currently trying to figure out how we can use them.  I was thinking of putting them up over the framed artwork, but I think it might actually look better if I drape the framed artwork with fabric and put the posters in the blank spaces.  We'll see.

I just need to find some hot pink votive candles and we'll be all set! 

Merry Christmas

 

Merry Christmas, everyone!  These are some photos from our Christmas Eve Brunch.

 

Here's our little buffet.

 

I made this goat cheese quiche with a hash brown crust.  It was really good (and easy to make)!  I added smoked salmon and that seemed to work out just fine.

 

I'm only showing the detail shot of the cranberry upside-down cake, because part of it got stuck in the pan, so it wasn't as pretty as it should habe been!  (It tasted wonderful though.)

 

We also had mimosas and bloody marys.  This recipe is really good.

I hope everyone is having a wonderful holiday!  Pictures of finished holiday quilts and more cookies are coming soon.

Hydrangeas

There isn't much point to this post.  I just wanted to show some photos of the hydrangeas I cut this weekend.  We have several bushes growing on the side of our house.  I think these are the last flowers I'm going to get from them this year.

 

We had some friends over on Saturday and I decorated with several arrangements with the hydrangeas.  This particular one was just some blooms floating in water in a shallow glass bowl.

Cookie Boxes

I'm recovering, slowly but surely, from our party on Saturday.  This is the first of, hopefully, several follow-up posts.  These are the boxes I made to put the cookies in.  They're standard-issue four inch square kraft boxes wrapped in self-adhesive ribbon, with paper birds and crepe paper flowers.

I used this paper, this crepe paper, and this ribbon -- all from Martha Stewart Crafts.  The boxes were lined in glassine paper in cerise, teal, apple green and white.

I will probably never use self-adhesive ribbon again.  It's nice to seal up the boxes, but it's also impossible to reposition so, if you look at my boxes closely, you can see how wonky all the ribbon is.

The crepe paper flowers were attached to the boxes first.  I made double sided petals and leaves, like this: Download petals.doc.  I used five petal pieces for each flower, fanned them out so the petals were even all around, punched a 1/8" hole in the center, and attached them to the boxes with a tiny brad.  (I  used the pointy part of a compass to punch holes into the boxes.  Not high-tech, but it worked!)  Once the flowers were attached, I shaped the petals with my fingers.  I attached the leaves to the back of the birds, which are just cardstock shapes I cut out using a template I made.  I used a fine-tip marker to draw on the eyes and write the names.

In all, there were 46 boxes.  Here's a blurryish shot of a bunch of them:

And a close-up of one:

 

Wedding Recap Part Two: Cupcake Bonanza

The other thing I made for Drew & Mieke's wedding was a cupcake tower/table/thingie, which included red velvet cake with cream cheese frosting, chocolate cherry cake with chocolate cream cheese frosting, and vanilla cake with vanilla frosting.  I also made a 6" vanilla layer cake for the couple to cut during the reception and a 4" vanilla layer cake for them to freeze for their anniversary.

As an aside, I'm curious how many people actually freeze and then eat the top layer of their wedding cake.  I have no idea whether Drew and Mieke will freeze the one I made them.  Personally, I think the idea of eating anything that old is rather disgusting.  I don't know this couple very well though, and they seemed to want to do some more traditional things, so I thought I would give them the option.  Also, the little cake looked nice on top of the cupcake tower.

Here's a closer shot (albeit at a weird angle) of the cutting cake.  I, literally, threw the sanding sugar at the sides of the cake to make it sparkly and I think it actually came out looking much, much better than it should have given my low-brow technique!

And a close up of tower with the top layer/anniversary cake:

And a close up of some of the cakes, and one of the paper flowers I made to decorate:

And another shot (at another odd angle) of the full table:

Wedding Recap Part One: Table Stuff

Drew and Mieke's wedding was last Saturday and, because I was there early to set stuff up, I was able to get some good photos.  Here is a shot of one of the tables.  I'm honestly not sure who made the awesome centerpieces, but they were very impressive and includes LOTS of orchids, which were just gorgeous.  I made the little favor boxes at each place setting and the table cards (the tables were named after trees).  There aren't any pictures of them, but I also made matching escort cards.

Here's a close up of a favor box:

And a picture of what was inside each, a lemon cookie, coconut fudge swirl cookie and chocolate crinkle cookie:

ETA:  The Coconut Fudge Pinwheel cookie recipe is from Martha Stewart's 2000 Holiday Cookies magazine supplement and is also in Martha Stewart's Christmas Cookbook.  I have had many requests to e-mail this recipe.  Unfortunately, I cannot distribute this copyrighted material, so I hope that pointing you to the publications will be at least somewhat helpful.

And here is a close up of one of the table cards:

Drew and Mieke seemed happy with everything and the glass everywhere was especially cool because it ended up raining all night.  (I'm actually not sure whether the couple was disappointed about the rain, but I thought it looked really cool.)