So today was my husband’s birthday party. Tomorrow is his birthday, he’ll be 26! Everyone say happy birthday Aaron! *smile*

Anyways, so.. because I’m the wife, and everyone knows me for my food, I had to get on the ball this week and make a ton of it. This is why I’ve been slightly neglectful of my blogging duties, also, I pulled an all nighter last night, finally getting sleep between 6am and 10am. It was rough, but my husband REALLY wanted cupcakes to bring to work so he could celebrate his birthday at work,  and… I had to get his cake finished.

I’ve probably said it before, but I used to be a “professional” cake decorator. I worked in a bakery and I decorated cakes for 2.5 years. It was cool, but you know when you do something at work, its not something you want to do at home. This is probably why my beginning food blogging directly coincides with my quitting that job.

So all of my family and my husband’s family knows that, and because of it, I feel I have this standard to live up to with the appearance of my cakesneverbashfulwithbutter.comhttp://www.neverbashfulwithbutter.com that I make (which I only really make for birthdays and baby showers, I’d rather do cupcakes) and since I feel I have this standard to live up to, I end up doing stupid things like staying up until 6am working on a birthday cake.

But everything ended up just fine. The cake was nice, the theme went off without a hitch (the birthday theme was “white and nerdy” after the Weird Al Yankovic song of the same name.) We had a costume contest at which Aaron (or Darth Aaron as he told people to call him) was the judge, and of course, his mom won.  I made up word finder puzzles with math, computer and chess words on it, also we had a star trek trivia contest. It was tons of fun.

We also had a zillion people crammed in our tiny apartment. More people showed up than I was expecting, and most people that had planned to just drop by (which were about 6 of the people there) actually ended up staying quite a long time because they couldnt pry themselves away. If I’m good at anything, its keeping people busy, their tummies full, and their minds occupied during a party. When people DID leave, I had a box full of assorted little toys (like something you would have got from the dentist or doctors office as a kid, if any of you remember that) and everyone just loved picking out a little toy to take home with them. People like prizes, and I make sure to keep that in mind when I have a party.

Alright, back to the food.

We gave up on having nerd themed food. It was just too hard. I had to make enough food for roughly 25 people to eat during THE DINNER HOUR. Considering most of these people came here right after work, or after stopping home for a few minutes after work, I knew that people would be very hungry and probably not notice any of the work I’d put into special nerdy foods. So we went for the “fill ‘em up” approach.

These photos do not even begin to show how much food we had. For every tray, imagine a backup tray in the fridge waiting to take the place of the one you see. Also, there was an entire table in addition to this that was covered in food.

So to give you an idea of what we had… heres the “menu”

Rigatoni with marinara, ricotta and mozzarella bake
Baked white cheddar macaroni
Crab rolls
Crab puffs
Crab cakes
California rolls
Cabbage rolls
Black olive, pepperoni and cheese pizza
Ham and pineapple pizza
Sausage, mushroom, pepper, ham and pepperoni pizza
Bread sticks
Stuffed Italian nachos
Nachos
Japanese noodles with garlic, carrots and celery
Homemade bean dip
Homemade salsa (w/ tortilla chips)
Ham and cheddar “tea” sandwiches
Turkey and havarti “tea” sandwiches
Whole wheat cookies with lemon raspberry filling (The ones that I made the other day. THEY FREEZE WELL!)
Chocolate iced chocolate cupcakes with chocolate caramel filling (these were gone before I could take a photo of them. Seriously, one person found out what they were filled with and people DOVE on them.
Plain chocolate cupcakes w/ cream cheese icing
Vanilla cupcakes with lemon cream filling and lemon lime icing
Melon tray (we bought it. I was too lazy to cut fruit at this point)
Carrots, celery and broccoli

Then the cake itself was a banana pound cake with banana bavarian filling and cream cheese icing.

And here are the photos that really don’t do the food any justice. They’re not the best quality, but I had a room full of people waiting for me to move so they could finish eating! sorry guys!

Aaron loved his cake. When he blew out the candles, his brother even made the “1 up” sound from Mario brothers. It was great.

So what have I learned? Make food, and do as much of the preparation work ahead of time. The only part I really hated was wrapping all of the crab puffs and little wontons. seriously? I had to have folded upwards of 200 of those little suckers.

But the best part of having a nerd party is that you have an excuse to buy more stikfas. You can look forward to many more adventures of Rodney, as we’ve now got about 8 or 9 more stikfas to come and play with us! *smile*

have a great night everyone! I’m posting this really late, but I couldnt really do much about that. Tomorrow I may do a breakfast post, but that depends on what my husband wants, it is his birthday after all!

Things will be all back to the normal schedule (posting monday-friday and every other Saturday) after this weekend, at least until the next birthday!

-A.

This entry was posted on Saturday, March 1st, 2008 at 12:51 am and is filed under April 2007. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.