Sunday, August 9, 2009

Catering from my tree house.

Finished August's first catering job last night. This was a super hard one for me in one sense --being on this next-to-no carb diet (just small servings of really healthy ones like oatmeal with no milk ) and it was all desserts. That being said, you know what happened. I held out really well until the day of where things got crazy and I didn't eat, and yes I ate HALF OF THE LOAF of the Paula Deen zucchini bread my neighbor sent me when I got home. Yeah. Free meal for the week and I didn't get to have it on a date with Jeff. We were trying for Monday. Back to my story.
These turned out killer. Pecan turtle chocolate brownies. I contracted out the base (because I would have eaten 5 pounds of batter if they were done in my house), then made homemade caramel to drizzle, toasted pecans and chopped them on there, and chopped big pieces of chocolate on there. People were going through the line and would go "oh my gosh those look dangerous" so I said "that means you'd better take two". So they did usually. I'd bought some extra just in case --we had plenty.

Lemon vanilla phyllo shells. I've got to defend myself --fillo and phyllo are correct, I like the old spelling better. I think it's more romantic.
See how the flower arrangement worked? It got a little wilty by the end, but not too bad. I was thinking it was going to be mostly neutrals, and they weren't using much blue, so I did all whites, silvers and greens. But it turned out they had a lot of blue. I wish I'd asked again about plans at the last minute ---I had access to a lot of blue. Oh well. I think it was OK. We had a few greenery sprigs to poke into my table to tie it in.

Mini berry pavlovas with cream and chocolate sauce. That was my other screw-up in the car on the way home. The client took a jar of chocolate sauce, but we had another quart jar that wasn't used up, and well, it was chocolate and cream and sugar and sweetened condensed milk.....



THIS was our kitchen for the night. We were in a park-like historical apple orchard with a small historical landmark cabin which I don't think was open at all. This pine was taller by far than anything around and had a big tent-like area underneath that was pretty hidden from guests.


Here's the opening and one of my helper girls for the night. There was also a squirrel living in the tree that kept chittering at us periodically, and at one point I think dropped a pine cone on my head. That, or the tree was mad. I had to use vaseline to get the pine sap out of my hair when I went home, but really it was pretty funny.

Here's our phyllo and brownie station.


Here's the pavlova station. The girls were great workers, but there was also a lady there named Debbie who was AMAZING. I was so grateful for her. She was also the only one who stuck around and helped me pack up at the end. I hope she gets free movie tickets or something from the family. I would have paid her about a hundred dollars if she were one of my girls. Seriously.
Thought you'd like to see some of the other decor. This bridge is over a little creek that ran right through the back of our treehouse.
String quartet.
Blue and white. See the artichoke finials? I brought almost their twins for my table. That was cool. And lucky.

3 comments:

Deja said...

It's simple gorgeous. The arrangement turned out even better than your practice.

And wow the desserts sound good to me right now ... maybe I should have waited a few weeks to read this post.

belann said...

So glad it turned out so beautifully. Again, you are truly an artist.

Kelli said...

I think that the seams on my shorts are about to burst. Now I know why after reading the ingredients to your chocolate sauce.
Beautiful wedding. Beautiful tables. Beautiful food. You really are talented.