Burgers, Balloons, and Buttercream icing*

*not a post about a seven year old's birthday but rather about a college graduation get together!

We wanted to celebrate Abby's college graduation but didn't want to make a huge deal of it like a high school graduation (I don't think most people do big college grad parties?). A meal at home sounded just right.  Grilling burgers was an easy decision to make- Donnie likes to grill and everyone likes burgers... We did consider catering the food but that seemed excessive. Donnie enjoys grilling and while the idea of not lifting a finger except to clean the house sounded appealing to my general enjoyment of doing very little work(!), I actually do like to make food- sides and desserts that my family likes to eat. Also, while some parts of the weekend would be busy, it wasn't like I had no time to prepare items. So a grill out it was!

For the burgers, we bought frozen patties. Not as nice as fresh but when you have a crowd, it makes sense to do what is easiest. Donnie did doctor them up a bit with spices. I found frozen smashburgers at Sam's Club. I bought two boxes of twenty patties each and that worked out well. 

As for sides, Alyssa has a recipe that she likes to use for potato salad so she was in charge of making that, though of course I helped. We did this on Saturday- potato salad makes a bit of a mess- it was nice to not have to clean up that mess on the day that people were coming over. Alyssa made a TON of potato salad. It's something she loves and she was a little worried that our guests would eat too much and there wouldn't be a lot of leftovers. I told her to make a lot- we had all of the ingredients for practically as much as she wanted to make. So she made a lot...

There was even a small additional amount not pictured here that Alyssa had put in a bowl for her for her lunch on Saturday...

I made one of our favorite pasta salads as another side. I made the dressing on Saturday- it's garlic based and really good- but didn't boil the pasta and add the rest of the ingredients until Sunday. To cooked bow tie pasta, I added the dressing, bacon bits, cheese cubes (that I cut up even smaller. I think cubes are too big in this dish), diced tomatoes and broccoli.

Abby requested cowboy caviar dip but said that she would be happy to make it when she came on Sunday if I would have the ingredients for it ready for her to go. I make a veggie dip that's similar to CC but mine doesn't have avocado since I don't care for avocado. Hers turned out really good per the avocado eaters :).

We also had fruit and chips/dip but that was pretty much it food wise. No one went away hungry...

The meat is obscured in this picture but here was my plate- everything turned out good!

As for the decor/balloons, I really leaned into the balloon theme since 1) I have a balloon arch kit that I like to use and 2) I picked up another single use balloon kit  on a whim when I was in Louisville. I decided to use both kits- a balloonapolozza if you will.  

I wanted to pay homage to the colors of the college that Abby was graduating from- red and Miami of Ohio respectively for the indoor balloon arch. Regarding the balloon arch kit, I bought it a few years ago and do enjoy using it for birthdays and special occasions. I feel a bit badly that when the kids were younger, I often didn't have balloons for them for their birthday. Well, I don't think they'll wind up in therapy over the lack of balloons in their childhood so I should probably get over that particular regret. I guess you could say that I'm making up for lost birthdays with using the balloon arch now! I think it does add a bit of festivity to any occasion. 

Here I used the balloon arch for Jacob's birthday a few years ago.

Have balloon arch- will travel- I took the arch and balloons and created a balloon arch for Alyssa's HS grad party last year that was not at our house. 

When I use the kit in the house, I normally put it together on a table behind the couch (as in the picture with the blue balloons.) However, we have a new table behind the couch now and the mechanism that you use to attach the arch pieces to a table does not work with the table so I can't put balloon arches there anymore. For Sunday's get together, I had to place the balloon arch at a different spot that I don't care for as much but what are you going to do?

The balloons get attached to various points in the plastic disks.

This is how the balloon arch looked for Abby's get together. It looked fine but I definitely didn't prefer the location of it. 

I would have liked the balloon arch over the table in the forefront of this picture but it wasn't possible to place there.

A lot of balloon designs that I see in pictures are more free standing- the general shape is like a half arch but fairly amorphous. Balloons of various sizes are included in the design. Honestly, it sounded intimidating to me to make a balloon design without my kit that firmly places attaches the balloons. I've seen the designs so much that I knew it was possible to do- I just didn't know how to do it. 

This is an example: Joyce posted this picture from a shower that she attended recently.

When I saw this kit on sale when we were shopping in one of the cute boutiques in Louisville recently, I decided to buy it. I had recently purchased a floral table cloth and I thought how pretty it would be to do a pastel/floral design theme outside. I decided to use this kit for decor outside for Abby's grad celebration meal. 

The instructions were pretty easy on how to assemble the balloon design. The kit came with a plastic strip  that had holes in the middle of it. The end part of blown up balloons are squeezed into these holes which then contains the balloons. When I first saw how small the holes were, I was thinking that there was no way I'd be able to easily get the end of the balloon in the holes. It turned out that it wasn't too difficult though someone with diminished fine motor skills would likely struggle. You have to pinch the end of the balloon to make it as small as you can to fit it through the opening. 

The biggest struggle was that my electric balloon inflator would not blow up the small balloons. I tried it multiple, multiple times. Manually blowing up a large number of small balloons was not going to happen- I did not have time for that... so I had to let go of the dream of a "typical" balloon design (all the sad eyes). And yes, I could have put less air into regular sized balloons to make them smaller but I wanted needed all the big balloons that I could get to make the structure bigger.

So pretty! I love balloons 😄

Here are some of the balloons attached to the plastic thingy.

My goal was to not have an arch design... but the wind and me attaching it by myself had other plans... I guess balloon designs and arches go hand in hand for me.

I also only had time to attach one flower. Sigh. I know that Abby did not care AT ALL!!

Two small blisters courtesy of my balloon tying adventures.... 

Switching gears to the kitchen...

Buttercream frosting- I don't follow an exact recipe when I make frosting so no two batches turn out the exact same. (Though with the same ingredients, different batches taste similar.) The batch that I made on Sunday may be the best batch yet. It was soooo good! Here's what I did (for me to try to remember to make it again..).

Let me back up- my mom baked and decorated cakes on the side when I was growing up. She was a beautiful cake decorator and her frosting tasted really good. Hers was a bit of a different recipe- hers called for just Crisco (no butter), it called for an egg white (which is kinda odd since the frosting is not baked), and in addition to vanilla extract, it called for almond extract. The almond extract makes a huge difference in differentiating her icing from many others. 

My kids aren't crazy about the frosting recipe so I started trying to make buttercream icing- where butter is the fat, not shortening. A typical buttercream icing recipe calls for butter, powered sugar, vanilla and milk. Two sticks of butter makes a cup and that's the amount you're going to need to make enough frosting for a cake or batch of cupcakes. But yesterday, I realized that I only had one stick of butter (that's half a cup) in the fridge. I had more in the freezer but I didn't want to deal with a stick of frozen butter. So I thought of my mom's recipe... Crisco... and decided to use 1/2 cup of Crisco to replace the 1/2 cup of butter. So I used one stick of butter and a 1/2 cup of Crisco as the "meat" (er, fat) of the frosting. Then I dumped powered sugar into the bowl. I never measure the powered sugar though I know that most recipes typically call for four cups of powered sugar. I added seemingly more sugar than I should have but it was no big deal as that was where the milk, er cream, literally came in. I added enough heavy cream (most recipes call for milk; you need some liquid and cream and milk are both that. Cream is just much richer (and better tasting IMO) than milk) to create the consistency of the frosting that I wanted. Also added splashes of vanilla and almost extract and a pinch of salt. The latter really helps both to cut the sweetness and enhance it. I would never make frosting without it!! 

I had to stop myself from taking liberal "test bites" of the frosting as I was decorating with it. Because I had a cookie cake to decorate as well as cupcakes, I knew I'd need every amount of it. 

Doesn't it look like it tastes good? I'm biased since I know that it tasted good but I think this picture exudes good taste 😋

I tinted some of it red and some of it orange for Oxford and Knoxville references

I kept part of the frosting white- I bought these M cut outs from Etsy and thought they would look better with white as the frosting on the cupcakes.

Monday was a fun day of eating leftover sweet desserts and savory sides- though it's always a bit sad to take down decor and get back to regular life... Till next occasion, balloon arch.

Linking up with Joanne for Talking About it Tuesday