Fortunately the bride being showered was Molly, who is impressively not Bridezillicious despite the long planning haul and the impending commitment day, so I may have lucked out a little bit. Also, I had the use of my highly party-seasoned father's home and expertise ("No, lighting the bride-to-be on fire while singing death metal songs is not a traditional shower game!") Since very few people RSVP'd I took a bit of a leap of faith in composing party favors and surprisingly came out exactly even, so this alone makes me feel I was victorious. Also, it was just a day or two after the whole end of school thing, so I had a lot of baking energy stored up, meaning that the leftovers could probably feed a small African country, particularly since I supplemented my somewhat limited culinary skills with actual appetizers, crudites, and naturally chocolate. I may not have been able to support extra guests gift bag-wise, we could have absorbed hordes of gate-crashers.
I'm sad to say that since guests showed up early instead of the predicted "late", I didn't actually get a good chance to photograph the table within an inch of its life. Which is a shame, because we used all of my dad's nice silver and China and everything was awfully pretty. Here's kind of a blurry approximation though:
A brief tour of the table brings us to sushi, vegetables, wasabi dip, ranch dip, hummus, baguettes, sesame melba crackers, rolled ham (just to mortify the vegetarians), feta and carmelized onion apertifs, mini pizzas, tea, cranberry apple cider, champagne, orange juice, chocolate orange sticks, every variety of M&M (Molly and Marcus after all), TJs 'smores squares, chocolate-covered strawberries, some TJs chocolate nut squares, and my experimental baking binge-treats.
So, I get the occasional urge to bake and usually don't have enough time before it hits to actually stock whatever kitchen I might be using. This leads to a lot of improvising, for better or for worse. In this case, I lucked out a little bit, because I'd brought an enormous thing of whole wheat flour to my mom's house over the Christmas holiday and had left this Easter favor at the house:
Apparently this is all the rage amongst both the sorta-health-nut crowd and the gourmand crowd. I guess there were some claims that Coconut sugar was a low glycemic sugar or something that maybe isn't actually totally accurate, but then on the other hand it has a lot more minerals and vitamins in it naturally, so it's probably still a pretty superior alternative to pure white sugar. But more to the point: it tastes pretty good. It's a bit of a mix between honey and brown sugar and goes exceptionally well with peanut butter from my new limited experiences with the stuff. On the downside, it's expensive and it's still pretty much straight sugar. But hey, baking is all about straight sugar!! In the hands of a more master baker, I imagine this stuff is worth the extra price.
It's hard to tell exactly, but many of the treats are heart-shaped. I am calling them heart-cakes, even though most of these are actually modified from cookie recipes. The use of whole wheat flower, apple-sauce for oil, and some other proportional decisions definitely left the textures decidedly more in the tea cake arena of edibles.
We also had a lot of dried apricots that somebody bought from Costco during the Neolithic era, and some additional dried fruit from various stockings stuffed with more immediately appealing goodies. I minced those, simmered them with butter, sugar, cranberry juice and a dash of water for about a half hour and let it dry into this very odd gelee mess. The base is applesauce, whole wheat flour, oats, a little bit more sugar, raisins, and cinnamon. I put the mix in my heart-shaped tin and slathered the weird gelee on top. Ta da! I'm not entirely sure how I feel about the end result, but with a few tweaks, I think they'd make awesome accessories for a tea party.
The darker colored hearts took about a cup and a half of peanut butter, a cup of coconut sugar, cinnamon, nutmeg, ginger, other pumpkin pie spices, 1/2 cup applesauce, some baking powder/soda and about a cup of whole wheat flower. I think the peanut butter went really well with the coconut sugar, although chocolate chunks would have made these way better.
The white hearts are actually a cake mix that was around the house. Fortunately, I found some sprinkles and splurged for some double-chocolate icing. I think they're much prettier that way.
There are also brownies, but I made them on Friday and froze them so they'd be warm and gooey by Sunday, then of course forgot about them.
And of course, no spread-a-la-Adella would be complete without chocolate covered strawberries. Anyways, also, there were people. They were nice. There were gifts (not for me though, ah well). And photo opps. I really enjoy that we made the bride sit in front of all the creepy totem dudes looking over her shoulder.
In the spirit of fairness with photographs, I feel obliged to comment that this photo is not an accurate representation of Molly's mother (leopard print on the right), unless she managed to become pregnant, gestate and bear a child between the time Colbie pressed the shutter button and the time where we all breathed a sigh of relief to her the clicking of the iPhone. Cameras do some terrifying things to people and I will say that Marcus' family also looks a fair bit sprier in person. I'm just glad to look about average. Also, we all look a little washed out compared to Molly, who had just gotten back from one of those bridal makeup consulting things and was bedecked and bedazzled... oh also, naturally as the bride she just was far more radiant. Anyways, other people in the photograph include (from Molly's mom left), Marcus' aunt (YOU CAN'T BE MARCUS' AUNT!! YOU'RE TOO YOUNG!!!), Marcus' mom (YOU CAN'T BE...etc. it's a fun ongoing trend with Marcus' family), me (YOU CAN'T BE ADELLA, YOU'RE TOO... well can any one truly be Adella??), Jennifer, and Marcus' Grandmother (YOU CAN'T BE...).
It goes without saying that Marcus' family is insanely nice. I was glad to finally meet his mom, since Marcus has been probably one of my favorite members of either gender for the last five or so years. As I was walking his aunt to the door - hurriedly grabbing a gift bag to thrust into her arms awkwardly so as to keep the count perfect - she said that I looked awfully familiar and I agreed (I'm quite familiar to myself) and we spent some time trying to figure out where we might have met. I'm guessing it's one of those saw-you-in-photos-on-facebook situations, but I was tempted to say "yeah, I think that's because we actually kind of look alike." No, we kind of do, though.
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