{Annie's baby shower ~ part 1}

Well it's finally time to the big reveal of the baby shower. Well the morning of the baby shower didn't go quite as planned I ended up getting started later than I should have. I thought I was doing good but then everything ended up taking way longer than it should have and I didn't realize how long loading the car and setting up would take. I got to the location about 30 minutes later than I wanted to so I had to run around like a mad woman to get everything set up and get the cupcakes iced. Luckily my mother-in-law was there to help and then my sister-in-law showed up early and was able to help put some of the food out and make the punch, they were life savers. The father-to-be was there too and helped untangle the balloons and hang the banner. Everything that could go wrong that day did of course. The beam I was going to hang the pom poms from was way too tall to reach so they ended up getting put under the glass coffee table. I didn't have time to worry about it so I just had to let it go. I think I was being taught a lesson that day. Even though guests were showing up as I was running around finishing up we ended up only starting 6 minutes late and the guest of honor was able to see everything set up.

I was all flustered and not myself because during running around poor little Hannah was crying pretty much the whole time but she settled down once the shower started, thank God!

So the cupcakes were a success, everyone seemed to like them and the chocolate covered pretzel sticks that I made were a big hit. I will definitely do those again.

The cupcakes were banana which was requested by the mommy-to-be. I was told by one of the guests that I should make cupcakes professionally but I can't take the credit.  I didn't want them to be like banana bread so I scoured the internet to find a good banana cupcake recipe and I found one at schweetnsavory. The only thing I changed on the cupcakes was I didn't mash the banana I just cut them and then let the mixer chunk them up. I did a test batch a couple of weeks ago of 12 and they turned out great. I also change the frosting up a bit. The cream cheese frosting was a bit heavy for my taste so I made it to her instructions and then added cool whip to lighten it up and it worked, it also gave me extra. I wanted to have more icing on the cupcakes but I was in such a hurry and didn't want to run out that I skimped a little, but they looked ok. I had so much left over and my husband was mad that I had given the extras to Annie that I made chocolate cupcakes yesterday to use the rest of the icing, yummy.

The punch I made was also really good, the colors for the shower were blue, yellow, green, white and some teal so I wanted a green punch. It consisted of 1 can frozen limeade, 1 can frozen lemonade, 2 liter ginger ale, 1/2 can pineapple juice and lime sherbet on top. It had a tart kick to it and I liked that.

The goodies I had were chocolate covered pretzels, chocolate covered marshmallow pops (the milk chocolate ones were way better than the white chocolate, it made them too sweet), veggies and dip, apples and caramel dip and spinach dip and crackers. I should have known how things were going to go when I went to the store a couple of days before to get the bread for the bread bowl I was going to have for the spinach dip and they were all out of the bread, so thank God for crackers.

The games we played were baby bingo, baby babble (word scramble) and then guess how many dinner mints are in the bottle.

I'm going to have to write more later. This is getting long and Hannah is getting annoyed with me, lol.