Domestic Goddess(...?)

My friends Ellie & Livvy celebrated their 17th birthdays on Sunday, and had a big dinner party for us all in Ellie's garden! There were two requests: 1. Dress smartly, & 2. Bring a dish. I live in jeans, leggings and jumpers, and my idea of cooking is reheating leftovers or (on an adventurous day) making a toastie, so there was a slight amount of dread on part before the event....

The first one was pretty easily solved; I decided to go with a sixties look, and wore my hair in a beehive, a simple bright blue dress with white beading, and my highest/glittery-est heels! I didn't need a jacket, as the dress had long sleeves, and I kept accessories pretty plain as the hair & dress were the features :-)


Baking.  
I decided it was safer to bake than to attempt cooking anything too elaborate, but I did end up doing a savoury AND a sweet (I'm an ambitious lady)! AND I only needed supervision on one of them! It's definitely best to play it safe, and do something which can look pretty/sounds impressive, but is actually not at all complicated..

Pesto, Tomato & Feta Tarts

These are ridiculously simple, as all the ingredients are already made up, it's just a case of assembling! (Yes I cheated and bought the pastry, but given my cooking history, it was definitely in everyone's best interests!)

Cut out puff pastry into circles, place in a greased cupcake tray and spread some pesto in each one. 

Then place chopped cherry tomatoes on top and sprinkle some feta over.

Put in the oven for as long as the pastry packaging says, and you're done! 

Birthday Cupcakes
For these, I just followed a recipe from my favourite baking book, Cupcakes From The Primrose Bakery. I made up a normal batch of mixture, and divided it between standard sized cupcake cases, and some tiny ones. This was so simple, but I spent a long time on the icing to make it look more impressive (that's my best bit of advice - presentation says a lot!)



Again, I have to admitted I cheated on the icing, and bought Betty Crocker Vanilla Icing, because last time I attempted to make it, it turned out as a very sugary blue soup!! 

I did a base of the white icing as carefully as I could! & then used coloured icing pens on the bigger cakes to draw little pictures of balloons/presents/stickmen.... And I used some little silver stars, red sugar, and sugar butterflies to decorate the smaller ones as well to create this final product! 

So my main piece of advice would be - Cheat!! Keep it simple, and try as far as possible to ASSEMBLE, rather than actually cook....