Confirmation Reception

This weekend, I catered my second event, a reception for the confirmands after the confirmation service at our church, Raleigh Moravian. Since it was a pre-lunch soiree, we didn’t have a large menu, but since it was for a big group, we had to have a lot of it.

We dropped the girls off in nursery, and got to work. Casey was there, and offered to help out. I think part of the reason was because BK was having some separation anxiety, but he said also that there was no room in the sanctuary! A few minutes later, Barry came in and asked the guys to help him add some folding chairs because they actually had to turn people away! I may have gotten in over my head…

As I was getting everything prepared this past week, Nick was looking at the food and saying stuff like “four trays of sandwiches?? Don’t you think that’s a bit much?” or “eight dozen cupcakes??! Really?” (It ended up being 6 ½ dozen anyways…) but when everyone came in the food was gone in a flash it seemed! I literally came home with two boxes of crackers and a box of cheddar bunnies (kind of like goldfish). I did throw away maybe four of the cheese straws that I made… sorry, I was just kind of tired of looking at them J

Here’s the menu and some pics:

Herbed Cheese Straws

Artichoke and Garlic Dip

Italian Artichoke Dip

Turkey & Cheese Sandwiches

Cupcakes with cream cheese frosting

Lemon-filled sugar cookies

Key lime pie Meringues

Sparkling Lemonade- (Casey helped...he's an engineer :)

Things I learned this time around:

• Last time, I didn’t have a “schedule” of when I was making my food, so this time I did that, making sure to make things that utilized different equipment every day, so I wasn’t trying to use the oven ALL DAY.
• I realized there are some things that HAVE to be done on the day of, like icing with cream cheese frosting (don’t know that I’ll use that again!!).
• Maybe Linzer cookies are small for a reason
• I need to have a supply box of things that some places may not have; paper towels, trash bags, Clorox wipes, and chip clips are definitely on that list!
• Even though I now am making a schedule, I should probably run it by my husband, because he thinks more logically. For instance “maybe you should have made the lemonade a little later in the week, so that our whole fridge isn’t full for the next five days!” I’m just trying to get stuff made, and in a short time, but he’s right, I had very little to do yesterday, and could have made it then!
• EVERYONE comes to confirmation!! We had at least 300 people in the church, and we actually ran out of food! That’s one thing that’s difficult about planning an event when you don’t know how many people will be there… since it’s getting to be summer time, sometimes we only have about 100 people at church, I knew there would be family and friends coming in, but that’s just crazy!! I think Nick sees now that I know some of what I’m doing at least!

That’s all the events I have for now, but many a business card has been handed out or picked up, so I’ll let you all know when something else comes up! Thanks for reading!!