First Post/Valentine's Day Party

Hey viewers! This is my first post so hopefully people will like what I have to offer. Since it is close to Valentine's Day, I decided that the first party I post about should be a Valentine's Day party! I had this party for my family and a few friends of the family, and everybody seemed to love it. The best part was that it was fairly easy to put together and it was a lot of fun to work on!

This was my beautiful food table! Plastic tablecloths make things easy and they look nice, so don't be afraid to use them. I used pink and white ones for my Valentine's Day Party table. I wanted to raise my cupcake stand up and add depth to the table, so I put a cardboard box lid in the middle of the table and covered it with a white tablecloth that I used as a table runner. Rather than using all matching dishes, I decided to use a variety of white, silver, and clear glass dishes.

Strawberry Milk and Strawberry Lemonade

I had small glasses of strawberry milk and strawberry lemonade set out on the table for guests to take and then I had a pitcher of each for refills. I wasn't sure of the best way to make strawberry lemonade so I made regular lemonade and then added the strawberry syrup that was also used to make the strawberry milk. This actually made great strawberry lemonade and then I just added a strawberry to the side of each glass as a decoration!

Valentine's Day is a time for sweets and treats, but I knew that my guests would want more than just cookies and cupcakes. I didn't want to venture too far from the color scheme though so I had chips and salsa (red), crackers with turkey (pink) and cheese, and strawberries (red) and grapes.

I wanted a variety of good Valentine's day candy so I had M&Ms, candy conversation hearts, twizzlers, Lindor white chocolate truffles, and cotton candy. I picked out the red M&Ms since I wanted softer colors, like pink and white, on this table and then I was able to find bags of cotton candy that had several different colors of cotton candy in them. I picked out the pink and white to use on the table and left the other cotton candy for my family to eat after the party.

I love this white elephant and I thought it looked really nice on my pink and white Valentine's Day table!

I wanted to keep the cupcakes simple and pretty so I only used one icing color and no other decorations on top of the icing. I found it cute to decorate the cupcakes with two different icing techniques so that I could switch them off on the cupcake stand. I baked the cupcakes in red liners and then put white liners over the red ones after baking them so that the white liners would stay a vivid white and show a nice contrast with the red liners under them. I was able to use one of my lace doilies to make a liner for the cupcake at the top of the cupcake stand!

heart-shaped cookies

 These heart-shaped cookies were very easy to make so I thought I should share my secret on how to quickly make heart-shaped cookies. I hate fooling with cookie cutters and rolling out dough so I found an alternative that at least works for heart-shaped cookies. I bought the pre-portioned place and bake cookies that come with 24 cookies in a pack and used two cookie dough balls for each heart. I placed one ball of dough on wax paper, cut a second ball of dough in half, and placed these two pieces on the top left and top right of the other ball of dough. I then smashed them all down with my hand and shaped the dough into a general shape of a heart and placed it on a pan. After doing this to all of the cookie dough (making 12 heart cookies) I put them in the oven and waited for them to finish baking. Once they were done baking I took them out of the oven and immediately went to work on making them look like hearts. This was pretty easy but I had to make sure to work fast before they cooled off and made the shaping process difficult. For each heart I just used the edge of a knife to make the sides of the heart come to a point at the bottom and then I used it to push the center of the top of the cookie down to make the top of each heart. Since everyone doesn't like icing I only decorated the front 3 cookies with icing and this was still really cute.

These heart-shaped marshmallows and fruit tarts were a big hit. For the marshmallows I simply bought heart-shaped vanilla and strawberry flavored marshmallows and dipped them in melted white chocolate.  

For the fruit tarts I used pre-made pie crusts, frozen strawberries and blueberries, sweetened condensed milk, granulated sugar, and powdered sugar. I divided a pie crust dough into 18 balls of dough, rolled each ball of dough in powdered sugar, and then placed all of them in mini cupcake pans (with liners in them). I used a tart shaper on each one and made sure to coat it in powdered sugar so that the dough would not stick to the shaper tool. I then baked the crusts and put the frozen fruit in a pan on the stove top. I added sugar to the fruit and heated it while the tart crusts were baking. When the crusts were finished baking I added some of the fruit and a small amount of sweetened condensed milk to each one.

I made this cute garland out of heart-shaped doilies and ribbon!

This is the dining room table where I had people eat after getting their food!

 This is what each of my place settings looked like. I wanted to carry the heart-shaped doilies into the dining room so I put one under each plate. I used white paper plates but I put silver chargers under them because silver chargers always make place settings look nicer. I put the treat bags on the plates because they matched the table settings perfectly and because I didn't want guests to forget them!

table scatter

placecards

These place cards were pretty easy to make and so was the table scatter. For the place cards I just cut out card stock rectangles and folded them in half. I then printed out the names of all of the guests, glued them onto red wrapping paper rectangles that I cut out, and then glued these to the card stock rectangles. The table scatter hearts and the hearts that I put on the goody bags were cut out of pink and red wrapping paper like the place cards were.


Well I hope that you are all able to use some of my ideas and I hope that you all have awesome Valentine's Day Parties! Thanks for looking at my blog and I will be sure to make another post soon. Let me know if you have any comments or suggestions!

-Rebecca