As I mentioned in my last post, my youngest sibling, Heather, graduated from high school on Saturday. We had her party right after the ceremony at our house. It was simple, but sweet, and we all had a great time.
For food, we served mac and cheese, ziti, chicken (BBQ and red-wine marinade), fruits, vegetables, homemade rolls, chips, and meatballs. Everything was very good! I somehow forgot to get a picture of the food, so you’ll just have to imagine what it looked like.
We borrowed a simple white tent from a friends, and used that on our lawn, along with a table set up on the deck covered by a smaller pop-up tent. We had a separate tent for cake and decorations. For centerpieces, we filled large mason jars with bunches of white hydrangeas from our yard and tied the jars with coral ribbon bows. We set up a cornhole game and a ladder toss game on the lawn, which the younger kids really enjoyed.
The cake table was my favorite (because that was what I was in charge of). Instead of buying a large sheet cake, Heather decided she would rather have a few different smaller cakes. At her request, I made a delicious raspberry lemon cake (recipe here) with buttercream frosting (recipe here) and a simple chocolate cake (1 box cake mix + 1 15-oz. can pumpkin + 1/2 c. water) with chocolate frosting, and my uncle and aunt made a cheesecake. She didn’t want any decorations on the cake itself, so I made a banner that said ‘Congratulations’ for one of the cakes and a large ‘2014’ for the other cake. We set out a small wooden box for cards, along with a photobook of photos from her high school years and hung pictures of her when she was younger above that, connecting the photos with tiny wooden clothespins (this is a little hard to see in the photos, but looked great in real life).
It was simple but pretty and I’m pretty sure everyone really enjoyed it. The raspberry lemon cake got a TON of compliments, so you should definitely try it out. The only comment I have about it is that the recipe is very large- it will make 4 9-in round cakes (we used 3 layers for our cake and saved the fourth to just eat ourselves). For a 3-layer cake, I ended up having to make an extra half recipe of the frosting recipe, but otherwise I loved this frosting!
The Oke Den 