American Whitney

Yesterday was the baby shower that I’ve been tweeting about on and off. It was thrown for my cousin-in-law, who is expecting her first child. A girl, even. I’d be lying if I didn’t admit that I was madly jealous. A girl would hopefully be a bit of calm in the storm that is my daily life.

But that’s neither here nor there.

For the party, I made mini quiches (broccoli & bacon, asparagus & bacon), mini macaroni & cheese cups and four dozen cupcakes (strawberry and chocolate) topped with cream cheese frosting.

And all were a hit! I learned a lot of valuable things about catering an event. One, it isn’t enough to have more than enough ingredients for what you’re making. I only bought enough cupcake liners for the 48 cupcakes. So when I’d made a batch of chocolate cupcakes and tasted the batter, only to discover that I’d forgotten the sugar… I had to fall back on some plain ol’ aluminum liners for those.

By the way, chocolate cupcake batter without the sugar tastes like dirt.

I also learned that when your gut says you should buy some mini-cupcake liners, you should buy some. The macaroni cups didn’t quite set as nicely as I would have liked, but they were delicious. So the mini liners would have been perfect.

What else did I learn? That I need to stop procrastinating! I was busy making the macaroni and cheese cups after the party had started (which was fine by me), but I could have finished it all right on time if I only just started doing things when I started thinking about them.

I also learned that if I ever do take the catering leap, I do not want to decorate. I’ll have someone who does it, because I’d much rather focus on making the food look lovely.

The party was wonderful, though. The food was great, the company was wonderful. And had it not been for a guest’s car being dented by a neighbor, it would have been perfect!

This week, I’ll share the recipes and my reviews (since none of them were my own).

PS One last thing I learned- always make sure that someone knows just how much fruit you need for 40 people. The woman who did the fruit platter melon-balled enough fruit for about 100 people. It was a comedically large amount of fruit.

Every so often, I do something silly. A cousin of TheBoy’s has a baby shower at the end of this month, and I volunteered to make cupcakes, mini-quiches and ice cream. For how many people? We aren’t sure yet. But it’s looking like it could be a lot.

So this week I started my search for some amazing strawberry cupcakes. I want something that tastes like strawberry is a little pink, sweet but not too sweet, and can hold up to a cream cheese frosting.

The first recipe I’ve tried is Sprinkles’ Strawberry Cupcakes, found via MarthaStewart.com. They’re a nice cupcake- the texture is right, but the recipe doesn’t use very much strawberry puree, so it’s only a hint of strawberry.

On a recommendation from my mom, I’m going to try this recipe next – Angie’s Famous Cupcakes from Good Things Catered. But first, I need to buy some more strawberries. I bought 4 lbs on Monday, only used a little for the recipe- and my boys ate the rest.

They are strawberry eating machines. Thank goodness we live in Southern California, where the berries are local and fairly cheap. I’d be poor if they were this obsessed with blueberries!