“FAVORITE THINGS” 30TH BIRTHDAY PARTY – PART 1

My husband recently turned the big 3-0. I’ve secretly been thinking about planning this party for years, and I knew I wanted to fill the whole house with manly decorations and lots of food! This is where I started. If you know my husband, you know he gets pretty passionate about the foods and drinks he loves. He tends to get obsessed with certain things – read: cold brew coffee- so as we got closer to locking down a theme for the party, it dawned on me to do a “Blake’s Favorite Things” party.   Of course, the hard part is getting Blake to figure out exactly what his favorite things are.

Because there were so many items, I decided to divide it into different stations or “bars.” This made it easier to figure out how to make it work with placement and décor; we ended up with five.  As far as décor goes, he likes the industrial modern look (think, hipster coffee shop.)  See below for pictures, menu and details:

SNACK BAR

I made these banners for each bar. I just printed out the letters onto paper and cut them out with an Exacto knife.I also painted a menu board for each table. I bought plywood boards from a craft store and painted them black. I then designed the menu boards, printed them out and traced onto the board. After the tracing was done, i went over it with a white paint pen.   To fill some space on the bottom of each board, I included some of Blake’s favorite quotes.Blake loves cheese. Blake loves to be fancy. So, a fancy cheese plate was a must. As you can see from the picture, I used craft paper as a runner on each table. It makes for easy clean up and goes along with the theme!Blake’s favorite chips are Dirty brand Funky Fusion Chips.  Instead of just serving them in a bowl, I bought regular ol’ paper bags, cut them in half and stamped them with an arrow stamp.  I think it was an easy and cute way to display chips.  I also designed individual name cards for each food.Blake also loves to snack on Chex mix. My mom actually puts bags of Chex mix in a box and wraps it up for him every Christmas. I decided to make 3 types of homemade chex mix. Links to recipes below:

Cajun Style Chex Mix

Original Chex Mix

Sweet & Salty Chex Mix

I made Blake pick a favorite fruit so we could have something semi-healthy. When setting up your table, you usually will want different heights. An easy way to achieve this is to get some boxes and wrap them in wrapping papers that match the rest of your décor.  This is a cheap way to make a table look really good and pulled together.

Y’all, this bacon will change your life. This is a recent discovery and another favorite of Blake’s. I made this for a friend’s baby brunch and it was a huge hit (more on that party to come.)  Get the recipe here.  You can thank me later.

Southern Food Bar

On to the Southern Food Bar; this was kind of an obvious choice. We are both from the deep South and southern food is a favorite thing for both of us.While it’s hard to narrow down favorite southern foods, fried chicken, biscuits & macaroni and cheese were kind of a given.I have a confession – the fried chicken came from KFC.  Now, I can fry up some great chicken, but I am not about to do it for thirty people along with all the other things I had to make.  Blake insists on this mac & cheese for every holiday. It’s an old family recipe and I have been eating it for every holiday since I was born.  It’s also the first thing I cooked for Blake when we started dating, so I am flattered it is one of his favorite things.Biscuits. MMMmmm. Who doesn’t love biscuits? When Blake decided he wanted biscuits, I decided to make it as difficult on myself as possible and make three different types of biscuits with accompaniments.  You can see my adventures in testing biscuits in a future post.  A regular, good ol’ Southern Biscuit with Golden Eagle Syrup was a must for Blake. He grew up in Alabama eating this type of table syrup and biscuit. I also made sweet potato biscuits with homemade maple butter and blue cheese biscuits with fig preserves we got from a farmer’s market in Jackson, MS.That’s all for my first “Favorite Things” post.  The rest of Blake’s “Favorite Things” bars (Korean Taco Bar, Drink Bar and Dessert bar) is coming soon in part two!  If you try out the recipes or have any comments or questions, let me know on Instagram @dwellanddine or on Twitter at @dwellanddine.

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