A Little Bit About a Lot of Things

My parents just celebrated their 50th anniversary. My family was in town and we ended up throwing my parents a surprise party. The surprise was almost blown a few times, but my mom was surprised all the way up to the point where she opened my front door! Prep work for this party was a beast as I was doing most of it on my own. I wasn’t going to cook, with little kids, I knew my limits. I had my good friend Kim make the cake, I ordered most of the food from Brother’s Marketplace in Weston, picked up beer and prosecco at Trader Joe’s, and got the charcuterie from Moody’s in Waltham. We had the party in the later afternoon, so were weren’t planning on serving a meal, but we had so much food that people ate, and ate, and ate. No real theme for the party, my mom loves Liberty prints, so I made it a point to get paper goods with all different Liberty patterns. I bought them off of Amazon, and they are Meri Meri.

Brother’s Marketplace was amazing. Basically one stop shopping. Everything was super easy. I got steak tips for 20, picked them up cold and warmed them up in the over before the party. Served them in a warming tray and kept them heated with a Sterno. Sides were a corn and bean salad (for 10), a fruit salad (for 10), Caesar salad (for 10) and an amazing crudité platter (for 10). They were very conscious of someone who had a nut/sesame allergy, double checking that the marinade for the steak tips didn’t have sesame in it. Let me just tell you how many people RAVED about the steak tips. They are our favorite, and people just couldn’t believe that a market made them!

The cake was my first stop at 9am. I picked it up in Weymouth and dropped it off at home (this summer was not ideal cake weather). I didn’t want it to start to sweat or melt. Second stop was Moody’s in Waltham. I picked up the charcuterie platter for 20. They put out an awesome product. Again, great with the nut/sesame allergy here, they gave us poppyseed crackers instead of sesame. I was able to choose what I wanted on the plate, I had taken my brother to Moody’s a while back and he LOVED the Parmesan salami (although he doesn’t remember that he did) so that was a MUST on the plate. I also picked hard cow cheeses because if there was going to be left overs, I wanted it to be something I would want to eat. The honey, mustard and picked veggies were a really nice compliment on the plate. Moody’s charges per person for the charcuterie platters.,

I did make a few things for the party. A pasta salad with a recipe I stole from my sister in law. Peach and burrata salads are SO in this summer. I decided to make a simple peach, mozzarella, prosciutto salad and topped it with a drizzle of balsamic. Another option (if we didn’t have a nut allergy) would have been pesto over top. This salad went in the blink of an eye, and people were raving about it. I made a shrimp dish that also flew off the plate – super simple to make ahead of time and people just think it’s fancy. I doubled the recipe and used 2 1/2 pounds of shrimp for the 45 people that were at the party.

How AMAZING are these flowers?!? Again, people couldn’t believe that these came from a market. I picked these up at Brother’s, the talented Ali Papa put these together. I told her that I wanted all white and ‘elegant’ and she whipped this up. My mother loved them! We ordered two arrangements to balance out the long dining room table, allowing the cake to sit at the center.

The cake turned out AMAZING! I was originally going to do a flat cake of the record. My dad proposed to my mom on a record cover, that used to be hanging up at their house. But when I went looking for it, my mom had replaced it with another picture, so on to plan b. We used to have this old olive green, wood panel station wagon that we would go on road trips in. I was looking through my friend Kim’s instagram and she had just done this amazing VW Beetle cake. So thus the decision for a station wagon cake! The top brown and yellow things are suitcases, and on the other side they have all our names on them – like a family tree.

All in all, quite the afternoon. My parents were excited to see all of their friends, and my dad didn’t run away once he realized what was going on, so I would call that a success.

Tags: DIY, party