Beatles Birthday Party!

This weekend I hosted a combined birthday party for myself and my friend Mike. Both of our birthdays are actually in about a week, but we figured people would be busy with Easter stuff next weekend, so this weekend worked nicely for the party! I wanted to have a Beatles theme because Mike and I both really like them, and so do most of our friends. Lots of planning, baking, and decorating went into this party and it was all sooooo worth it! It turned out great! Here are some pictures from Saturday night. Enjoy!

Here's a picture of the Octopus's Garden Salad Bar before the food was set out. I had lots of fun decorating this table. I think the bright colors fit with the psychedelic theme of the Beatles! :)

Here's the table filled with food!

Barbecued 'Blackbird' Wings- I was pretty lazy with these and just used premade boneless chicken wings that were on sale at the store, but they were still pretty tasty according to Ben. I wasn't a huge fan, but I don't really like processed chicken so that was my biggest problem with them.

Sgt. Pepperoni Pizza (there are pepperoni on those pizzas they are just hidden beneath the cheese!) Here is my favorite pizza recipe:

http://www.cdkitchen.com/recipes/recs/525/Pizza_Hut_Original_Pan_Pizza41605.shtml

This recipe always turns out delicious (if you like a thick crusted pizza!)

'Yellow Submarine' Sandwich Loaves with Mean Mr. Mustard frowning in the background haha. The sandwich loaves are just frozen bread dough filled with butter, ham, salami, cheddar and mozzarella cheese. Then I sprinkle the dough with Italian Herbs and Monterey Jack cheese.

Diggin' in

'Ginger Sling with a Pineapple Heart' Punch. This reference is kind of obscure, it comes from the song "Savoy Truffle" and I couldn't find a good recipe for a ginger sling so I made one up. This is just pineapple juice, frozen lemonade, water, ginger ale, and fresh pineapple slices.

Dessert Table!

'Cream Tangerine' shots! These are also a "Savoy Truffle" reference. I made these up too. They're just a slice of tangerine inside a shot glass filled with 1/4 shot peach schnapps and topped with homemade citrus flavored whipped cream.

Tangerines from the 'Tangerine trees' These are the same jello shots I made for the Pirate Party. They are so yummy! I doubled the batch this time. It's just 2 packets of orange jello with 1/2 cup of the water replaced with peach schnapps. They taste like sunshine.

'Marshmallow Pie' from "Lucy in the Sky with Diamonds" This is another made up recipe. I wanted to make something that tasted kind of like s'mores so I filled a graham cracker crust with chocolate ganache then broiled a layer of mini-marshmallows on top. In hindsight I wish I had used milk chocolate instead of semi-sweet, but that's how I always am! I prefer milk chocolate to dark/semi-sweet any day!

'Coffee Dessert (Yeah, you know it's good news!') Another "Savoy Truffle" reference because that song is just loaded with delicious sounding desserts. Another made up recipe. For this, I simply added around a 1/4 cup of super strong black coffee to the pudding mixture from the trifle recipe I posted earlier.

Chocolate Covered 'Strawberry Fields' I am beyond obsessed with these! I think they are such pretty colors!

All we (my awesome neighbor Vicky and I) did was color some almond bark green, dip the strawberries and then color coconut green for the grass! Warning: when you add food coloring to almond bark, it changes the consistency really quickly. That's why these look a bit... umm... rustic? I don't care though, the colors are pretty enough to make me forget about their imperfections!

'I heard it's your Birthday' cake and 'Savoy Truffles' (Oreo truffles) Oreo truffles recipe is as follows: Pulse 3 rows of Oreos in a blender until you get fine crumbs, mix with 1 package of cream cheese and 1 tsp vanilla. Refrigerate 30 minutes. Roll into 1 inch balls. Refrigerate 30 minutes. Dip in white chocolate.

Another view of the cake and truffles! The cake was french vanilla with raspberry preserves between the layers and cream cheese frosting. Those little rainbow sprinkles are super tiny versions of those Hershey's 'Kissables.' Here's what was inside:

Yep! A psychedelic rainbow cake! Perfect for a Beatles party if you ask me haha. This took forever to make but was so fun and worth it!

A nice big slice of rainbow cake for my wonderful cousin, Felix!

Having his cake...

...and eating it too!

That's it for the food portion of the night, but here are some of the costumes/ random fun shots of people throughout the night! :)

Elliot as Father McKenzie and Vicky as Julia, oceanchild.

Kelsey as 'the girl with kaleidoscope eyes'

Felix's girlfriend Maria as herself + Pippin as one of the 'piggies.'

Felix as himself with Merry as one of the 'piggies.'

Mike as Rocky Raccoon and Miles as Maxwell Edison (you can kind of see his silver hammer in his right hand.) Oh, also Ben making a blurry appearance, perhaps as the 'Nowhere Man.'

Me, getting laced up as 'Her Majesty/The Queen'

Applying Mike's 'Rocky Raccoon' makeup.

Ben as 'Polythene Pam' (She's so good-lookin' but she looks like a man!)

Aww.

Gennie as John Lennon! Her hair, glasses and fake mustachio were just perfect for this!

Joey as Jimmy Shaw from Metric. (Apparently they have a song about the Beatles so that makes this costume appropriate haha.)

Kelsey and Elliot posing in the kitchen haha.

Ben dancing to Beatles Rockband. I think he enjoyed wearing that dress. He seemed very confident with his body while wearing it haha.

India playing Rockband. Please note the 'celophane flowers of yellow and green, towering over [our] heads.'

Angela as someone who is 'going to a party party, yes, [she's] going to a party party!' haha and Justine as Annie from "I am Sam"

Group shots of less than half the guests at the party. I'm not sure why we didn't get any of everybody. Ben was standing on my shoulder in the first picture. Also, I made those mustachios on sticks out of black construction paper and some wooden craft stick things I had laying around. There was one of each type of Beatles' mustachios: the Harrison, the Starr, the McCartney, and the Lennon! Looks like Erik has 'the McCartney' and India has 'the Starr' in these pictures!

Thanks for reading! If I don't have pictures of you from the party and you were there, I'm really sorry! I wasn't very good at taking people pictures that night. Feel free to send me some pictures of yourself from the party and I will add them to this post.

Bad at Blogging, Worse at Cleaning. :(

Apparently I suck at blogging. I haven't written anything on here in weeks! Here's a little something I made for my concepts in visual arts class a few weeks ago to show you I haven't been completely unproductive!

The point of this assignment was to portray a little known fact about a famous person, using collage techniques and using ONLY photos from magazines. Anyways, I found a ton of pictures from space in a national geographic magazine and cut them out to look like Carl Sagan and pot leaves because he was a big supporter of legalizing marijuana.

In other news, my kitchen is an absolute MESS. Like, it is unbelievable how messy it is right now. I don't even know how it got that way! It was super clean at one point last week and then all of a sudden it's super messy! Perhaps I will take before and after pictures of it and show you people what I'm talking about! If I don't, it's because I don't know where my camera is hiding.

Anyways, prepare yourselves for a super awesome blog post in the near future! This weekend I am hosting a Beatles party as a combined birthday party for myself and my friend Mike and I promise there will be some great Beatles themed recipes and decor!

Also, my latest art project for my concepts in visual arts class involves using the myth of Prometheus and relating it to a current event. So if anyone has any breakthroughs on that topic, please let me know. I am considering making it about Julian Assange and how he gave information from the government to the people and was then arrested which kind of mirrors the story of Prometheus in which he steals fire from the gods and gives it to humans, and is then chained to a rock where an eagle eats his liver out every day for the rest of his life. Okay, so I'm pretty sure liver-eating eagles have nothing to do with the wikileaks guy, but there are definitely other similarities between the stories. Anyways, I am thinking of using that as inspiration but having trouble thinking of an artistic way to portray it. Especially because when I think of wikileaks, no images in particular come to mind. :( I guess I will keep thinking about this for a while and see what I can come up with.

I'm going to go clean the kitchen then I'm off to class! Hope your evening is more fun than mine. :)

Pirate Party!

So I realize it's been a while since I blogged. Oops. I guess it's just because I have been busy and sick for the past week. I started getting sick on St. Patrick's day and have had a bad cold since then. It's getting better now though, thank goodness! We had a lovely time on St. Patrick's day waiting for Ben's new piano to be delivered, travelling to Eau Claire, playing with Ben's sister's new puppy, and eating supper with her and her friends. Oh, and I was productive that day, I started a new painting for a friend who asked me to paint a picture of her dog. :) It's not finished yet so I haven't taken pictures, but I'll post some when it's done.

Friday morning we had to head back to Minneapolis as soon as we woke up because Ben got called into work. I spent the rest of the day preparing for the pirate party we had that night. It was a smaller party than most of our other ones have been, so I didn't go overboard (see what I did there?) with food and decorations and stuff. I made a baked potato bar and tried to attach sliced cheese sails to them to make them look like little potato boats (an idea I got from Amy Sedaris' craft book Simple Times: Crafts for Poor People) but it didn't work. :( Oh well though! At least they tasted good. For potato toppings I just put out butter, sour cream, a few types of cheese, and bacon bits cooked up by my friend Erik. Erik and another friend, Elliot, helped me with the majority of the baking for the evening which was really nice of them. Elliot and I made an apple pie-rate ship using this recipe:

http://allrecipes.com/Recipe/Apple-Crumb-Pie/Detail.aspx We omitted the walnuts and raisins though.

Elliot and I also made these delicious chocolate cookies that are supposed to look like tricorne hats, but I think we rolled them out a little too thick so they kind of puffed up and lost their shape. Oh well haha. I'll know for next time!

I got the idea for the apple pie-rate ship and the idea and recipe for the tricorne hat cookies from this site. Hers look much much better than mine haha. In my defense, I was in a big rush when I was making mine--trying to get everything done in time for the party. :)

http://diamondsfordessert.blogspot.com/2010/05/apple-pie-rate-ship.html

and here's the cookie recipe:

http://diamondsfordessert.blogspot.com/2010/06/jack-sparrows-tricorne.html

I replaced the brown sugar with white sugar because I was low on brown sugar after the pie and I am not a big fan of brown sugar + chocolate, I don't think they go very well together for some reason.

Oh! I almost forgot the star of the night! The Scurvy Fightin' (Fuzzy Navel) Jell-O shots! A recipe I made up by making normal orange jello but replacing 1/4 cup of water with Peach Schnapps. They tasted like sunshine! And I let them set up in hollowed out orange peels. An idea I got from this website: http://www.bakersroyale.com/fruit/lemon-drop-jell-o-shots/

I couldn't get a very good picture of them unfortunately. I am really getting sick of my camera not doing well in low lighting. I don't know how to fix it though. :( Oh well!

Here are some more fun pictures from the evening! It was a very good time, lots of interpretive dancing to disney music (I know--very piratey,) Circle of Death (which a lot of us played with soda because we didn't want to drink) and catch phrase! Good-mostly clean-fun!

Erik A with his sword. Ben helped the two Eriks make swords from random wood we had around the apartment. I did NOT appreciate them sawing wood in the kitchen and gettin sawdust all over the floor while I was trying to cook! Haha!

This picture is terrifying and I love it haha.

This is one of my favorites from the night haha. Emily was a 'pie rat' hence the ears and the shirt with pie on it haha.

Erik H with his sword and the pirate costume we made up for him in like 15 minutes out of random stuff him and Ben had.

Circle of Death!

I love this picture! Erik, India and Gennie all look really happy! :D

Dueling Eriks

Catch phrase! I LOVED Chelsey's impromptu costume. Isn't she adorable?

LoL Ben showing me a little leg while sitting on Erik H's lap. Also, I love how many people are crammed on our little couch. Poor Jeremiah is practically falling off the edge!

India giving Erik H a sweet temp. tat from a tattoo book her and Erik A brought with them!

All done!

Rambo? Is that you?

Ben singing and using fake bones as drumsticks while Jeremiah played the piano to "Don't Stop Believin' "

Christina with Merry and Pippin! Haha.

Interpretive dancing to "Circle of Life" from the Lion King.

I think the pictures speak for themselves. It was a good night! Hope these made you smile. Have a great weekend!