Baby Shower!!

In mid June I hosted a baby shower for my older sister, Laura. It was a lot of fun to put together and I think she had a pretty nice time celebrating the upcoming birth with her friends/family.

The main theme was a gender reveal. Laura and I knew the sex but the party goers were to guess and then have the gender revealed at the party. The colors were red and grey, the nursery colors.

Here is my picture wall converted for the shower to a baby wall with ultrasound pictures of the baby and the invitation.

Here are some games we played- Children's Book Title Scramble, Complete Mom's sentences, & Baby Jeopardy. Everyone also filled out well wishes/advice for the mom-to-be and a wishes for baby card. The small ribbon tied packages were left over prices for the jeopardy game... chocolate covered almonds. We played in teams so we needed a lot of prizes!

The picture in the bottom right corner was the table set up with the chalk board to take the votes, ribbon pins to denote your vote (red for girl, grey for boy), & more ultrasound pictures.

Food, yummy food! Everything was vegan (and easy to prepare because I always have too much going on on party day with limited time to devote to food prep!). To make the shower a bit more eco I used these super cute grey/white strip biodegradable straws with mason jars for the drinks. Biodegradable plates were also used as well as sugar cane fiber napkins. :) I used paper lanterns that I had on hand from other parties (and I will continue to use for future parties) so that we could keep from throwing away too many party decorations.

In the picture below there is a closer look at the little succulent plants that were given as favors (loved this so much that I gave them to my moms club friends for an end of year dinner favor!) but also served a dual purpose- decorations!

For the votes, the boy side got the most votes. And according to the wives tales we read off, she was going to have a girl (8 to 6). And you will see in the bottom right corner, the cupcake revealed that Laura is having a boy!

As a side note... the cupcakes were probably my most challenging undertaking. I found a yummy vegan cupcake recipe easy enough. The tricky part was the cream center. First, finding one that would turn out & be the proper consistency. (Took me a couple tries of various recipes before I settled on sweetened coconut milk with vanilla and thickened with agar agar.) Now the blue color was a whole different problem... concerning chemistry, believe it or not. So I didn't want to use any artificial dyes but needed it to be a shade of blue that was obvious enough for the guests to see. I first thought blueberries... right??? Well no. That was purple. Then I read that you could use red cabbage. Followed first set of directions I found online- boiled cabbage & used that "broth" to color the cream mixture. Nope. Still purple. Read more online. Discovered that to get blue from the red cabbage "broth" you needed to add baking soda to change the acidity. Of course not too much. And you can't heat this mixture after it turns blue or else it will turn a shade of grey. Thankfully this is what finally did the trick. It also kind of sounds yuck to have this in a cupcake... but in the end, it only took a little bit so you couldn't taste it at all. Whew. I was relieved to have that figured out, especially since I started the Monday before the shower (couldn't make cupcakes too early!) and had to go through several trials to get it all figured out.

 Lots of fun had by all and what a fun way to celebrate the upcoming arrival!! (I will be posting pics of mom-to-be on my fb page!)