The Low Country Boil

Low Country Boil, AKA Frogmore Stew, is the easiest meal to cook and clean up. No joke. Although it does take some time to cut all the ingredients.

We do this for tailgates and most recently, for our Hasbro Game Night party at the house. We use an outdoor boiling pot like the one pictured below.

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There's no real science to what hubby does, just timing....

Here are the instructions adapted from Paula Dean. Sorry there are no amounts... we made SO much last time and the hubs bought 2 bags of potatoes, 3 bags of frozen shrimp, 4 sausage, etc.

INGREDIENTS
Container of Old Bay (we're using a LARGE pot)
onion, quartered
lemon, cut in half (for flavor)
red potatoes, halved or quartered
Smoked sausage, cut into 2in pieces
corn, cut in half or third
shrimp, thawed

DIRECTIONS
Fill a large pot with enough water to cover all of the ingredients.

Add the Old Bay, lemon, and onion and bring to a boil.
After water is boiling at potatoes and sausage; cook for 20 min.
Add corn; cook for 10 minutes more.
Add shrimp; cook for 3 minutes.

Pull out the inner pot (the one with the holes) and dump food onto newspaper laid out on a table
(or drain if not using an outdoor boiler pot)

Don't forget some cocktail sauce for the shrimp.

Tada!

oh yeah, then for clean up... pick up the newspaper and throw away. (ok ok so you have to clean the pot, a cutting board and some knives)

Linking up: Shaken Together Life, Tatertots and Jello , Crafty Moms Share

The "House Guest Book"

So, the other day I was stuck at the car dealership (with all 3 girls) getting the car serviced and I managed to flip through a few magazines (yes... I did say I was there with all 3 girls AND I read a magazine... miracle I know)... but that's besides the point, anyway, I was perusing my latest Southern Living and came across their "Secrets to Southern Charm" section and was immediately intrigued!

Now I'm a Jersey girl... nothing southern about that, right? BUT I spent 5 years at Clemson in South Carolina (totally Southern) and I've always considered myself to be a southern girl at heart so I jumped right in.

It was a very good list and I actually did some of them already (have a signature drink at parties) BUT one got me excited and I decided right then and there that I was going to do it. That was #203... "Revive the House Guest Book". I LOVE this idea! What a perfect way to remember visits both large and small; from playdates with one of two buddies to our annual Christmas Cocktail party. Genius. Really. And I knew exactly where to put it; my hubby's Great Uncles antique desk that sits in our front hall that hubby and my dad refinished.

Pretty, huh? ALSO, I was even MORE excited because I thought this was the perfect tradition to start with our new home since we just moved in. So off I ran to Target to look for the MooreBabies new house guest book... but I didn't quite find one that I wanted; the ones at Target were more practical than pretty enough to sit on a gorgeous antique desk.

So I ran to Barnes and Noble and SUCESS!

I did have to sort of back-fill since I just bought it and we've had people over already but I am super excited to have a record of all gatherings hosted at our house!

 

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MooreBabies Gender Reveal Party!

One of these days I am going to catch up on, well... everything! It's been a busy few weeks, but that's besides the point.

YESTERDAY we had our gender reveal party for #3! For #1, I didn't want to find out, but hubby insisted. For #2, hubby was deployed and finding out just made it easier on me. SO for the third, it was MY CHOICE, and I wanted to have a Gender Reveal Party. I had first heard about these parties right after #2 was born and I knew I wanted to have one for our next child!

I had known about the cake, where you cut the cake and the cake itself is either pink or blue.  But THEN I came across a pin from pinterest (while not even looking for it) that showed a photo shoot reveal where they had helium balloons in a large cardboard box and opened the box to see what color came out. How fun right?! So I figured those were my two options.

For having wanted to do one of these for a while, I didn't do ANY research until this past Thursday (slacker!) because (a) before vacation I was busy planning a couples bridal shower and (b) we were waiting to see if the ultrasound tech could find out the gender before planning (#2 was uncooperative during the ultrasound).

So once we got the OK from the tech, I sent out a last minute evite to a small low-key Saturday BBQ Lunch/ Pool/ Gender Reveal Party and ended up with 13 adults and 14 kids (phew! Not as small as I thought, but still fun!)

For some reason I ALWAYS have to write a poem when it comes to parties (luau, Christmas, etc) so here was the poem I wrote:

The doctors saw,
and we will soon, too,
if pinks in our future
or maybe its blue.

Join us this weekend
for a BBQ lunch
there'll be beer and wine
(for the kids, fruit punch)

So now is your time
to make your pick,
another girl for the Moore's,
or a junior Eric.

Wear your guess,
either pink or blue,
and bring a snack for
all to share too.

Then of course was the 4th of July, so that took precedence and I took a break from party planning. But I picked up again late Thursday and Friday.

The Dessert Table

Menu

Aside from the desserts, I made hamburgers (prepped in advance with green peppers and onions mixed in) and hot dogs; all the guests brought a side, snack, or dessert!

Easy!

Now onto the party

Pink and Blue table
* Chocolate drizzled pretzles covered in pink or blue sprinkles *
* Red (I tried to find pink...) and blue jello *
* Pink and blue dipped marshmallow pops *

He or She candy bars!
* I used sharpies for this *

Pink and Blue Candy
Hershey's Bliss Chocolates - Dark (pink) and milk (blue)
Raspberry Dark m&m's and York Peppermint Patty Pieces

Drinks
Blue Hawaiian Punch - I'm not gonna lie, there's not a lot of blue drinks out there
Pink lemonade

Leis for guests to "pick sides"

 and finally...

The wrapped box of balloons

The reveal

Someone edited my "boy or girl" sign on their way out!

Here is what I posted to facebook (after I stopped laughing at the fact that we were having our THIRD girl... poor super outnumbered hubby)!

There were 2, but pink I see, now our count of girls is 3!

Linking up: DIY Showoff , Creating my way to Success,  Making the World Cuter,  Our Delightful Home,  Blackberry Vine,  Elizabeth and Co, Vintage Wanna Bee, Chef in Training, Homework,  Shwin and Shwin,  Not Just a Housewife, Sew Much Ado, 
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Strawberry Shortcake Birthday ::. The Food (and food tags)

I love themes for parties.

I really do!

Christmas Cocktails.

Summer Luau.
This is why, for Charlotte's Strawberry shortcake birthday party, I decided to have some sort of food or beverage to represent each of the characters (um... minus Cherry because, to be honest, she's not in the books that we have, which is what I initially got the party idea from; also I don't think she's like a full-time cast member, lol).

Strawberry Shortcake
Strawberry Shortcake Cups

Orange Blossom's
Orange Wedges

Lemon Meringue's
Lemon Cheesecake Bars

Blueberry Muffin's
Blueberry Muffin Pops (um... not as pops, lol)

Raspberry Torte's
Raspberry Lemonade

Plum Pudding's
Plum Grape Jello Jigglers
* um... I actually meant to put "Plum Purple Jelloe Jigglers" woops. I did try to find some dessert with plums, but eventually gave up because I didn't want to spend TOO much time on something!

AND for the Food Tags...

So super unbelieveably easy! I googled the strawberry shortcake cartoon characters and came up with images of each of the characters. I then printed them out onto cardstock and glued them to a cardstock tent with the food name on it.

There you go.

In doing my research for putting together this blog post, I tried to find where I downloaded my strawberry shortcake character images from... but I think hubworld.com changed the pictures. If you are interested in what I have, please contact me at themoorebabies(at)gmail(dot)com.

Linking up:
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Keeping it simple,
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{DIY} Party Water bottle Labels

We've all seen those super cute personalized water bottles floating around, right? So I decided I was going to do those for Charlotte's 3rd Birthday Party. So off to google (what did we do before google?) and I typed in "DIY water bottle labels" and came up with Life {Sweet} Life's DIY Printable Water Bottle labels.

I then headed over to my favorite, photoshop, to put together a super cute (in my opinion) label for the Strawberry Shortcake birthday party.

Here's how I did it:

I set up my label dimensions to be 1.5" by 8.25"ish (actually, the first time I made them 2" wide.. er... tall, but that was WAY bigger than the water bottle allowed, so I went back and shrunk everything). I created a new doc, changed the right dropdown to "inches" and then made my resolution 300.

Once my document was created, I created a circle of dots (using this photoshop tutorial).

I found a strawberry shortcake image from http://www.hubworld.com/ (Strawberry shortcake is on the Hub channel)

 Added a "3"

 Inserted a green bar across the label

Then added a pink bar just inside the green bar making the green the border.

Put a white circle on top of the pink and green, but under the dots, "3", and strawberry shortcake

Added some text ("Happy Birthday Charlotte *", repeated)

Copied that line 2 more times to fill my pink bar, and set the text slightly askew from the other rows

I also added a SMALL grey line at the very bottom so I could distinguish between the labels when I went to print them so I would know where to cute (see image below)

To print them, I opened a word doc and made my margins as SMALL as they could go (0.12" on all sides). Then I pasted down until I was at the end of my word doc.

I printed my labels out on regular old white paper (no cardstock as  Life {Sweet} Life suggested) and I got like 5 per sheet. I then separated them using my handy dandy paper cutter.

The tip that I walked away from this blog was PACKING TAPE. Forget about using waterproof paper (they have that?) or leaving your printer paper to wrinkle and tear; use the 2in wide packing tape so when you press it on the bottle, you have a tight* seal.

* I used publix water bottles and maybe they were a little flimsy, but I didn't have a TIGHT seal. Once submerged, they bleed... but it was still super cute!


Awesome.

Voila.

This is such a super easy way to personalize your party and tie your theme together.

Linking up: Delightful Order, Bacontime, Sun Scholars, Ladybird Lane, Delicate Construction, Naptime Crafters,  Tatertots and Jello, Young and Crafty, Crafty Moms Share, Marvelously Messy, Creating my Way to Success, Shaken Together,CRAFT, Homework, Not Just a Housewife, Blackberry Vine, Vintage Wanna Bee, Chef in Training, Our Delightful Home, Sew Much Ado, My Girlish Whims, Gingersnap CraftsDragonfly Designs, Trendy Treehouse, Blue Cricket Design, Handyman Crafty Woman, Crafty Blog Stalker,  

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Strawberry Shortcake Birthday ::. The Cake

 In case you missed my guest post over at Between U & Me the other day... here it is!

Strawberry Shortcake Birthday Cake

Ok, I'm not gonna lie... I'm really proud of this cake.

Like, SUPER proud of this cake.

So much so, that I would like to share with you how I did it.

1. Start with a strawberry cake (boxed... which was FANTASTIC!!)

2. Put on a crumb coat using whatever icing you want. I used canned because I didn't feel like making half a dozen batches of icing. This was buttercream.

3. I baked a white 8"x8" cake (plus a dozen cupcakes) because I figured that not everyone would really like strawberry cake. Once cooled, I cut 1/3 off, then cut that 1/3 in half.

4. Put the 3rd layer on (secured with skewers... we should have leveled the cake, but we didn't) and crumb coat and chill.

5. NOW using my Grandma's Wedding Icing recipe, cover the whole cake in green.

6. Smooth the cake using step 4 on Wilton's site (or after googling, this method looks awesome). I also added the icing for the pond...

7. ... then smooth the pond out and added the pathway (PS I used valentine's m&ms)

8. Next came the grass using tip 33. And then I took a break because my hand got sore. Back to the fridge went the cake.

9. Finally, I added in some color with some flowers; I made drop flowers (yellow) with tip 18 I believe and I made rosettes with tip 16.

Now we are ready for PARTY DAY!

I almost couldn't cut into it...

but with 17 3 year olds hovering around begging for cake, I had to give in.

Linking up: Crafty Mom Share, Young & Crafty, Tatertots and Jello, Lolly Jane, Around Tuit, Under the Table Dreaming, Crafts Keep me Sane, CRAFT, The Girl Creative, Delicate Construction, Making the World Cuter, Homework, Not just a Housewife, A Bowl ful of Lemons, Chef in Training, Vintage Wanna Bee, Blackberry Vine, Gluesticks,  Our Delightful Home

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