Sunday, October 12, 2008

a black tie affair

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Last weekend one of my roommates (not the apple picking one :P) and I hosted a very classy party, in honor of the opening of a new performing arts center at our (engineering) school.

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The opening of this performing arts center has been the topic of a lot of controversy lately, over many issues that generally center around the need for other improvements on campus, and the sheer amount of money being spent on this new building.

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While I have my own opinions about this, I won't go into them in too much detail on this blog.  However, as a club officer, I was invited to the invite-only Gala Opening Event last Friday night.  I definitely wanted to go check it out, mainly because I was sure there would be good food there (and I was right!).

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It was black-tie only - so sophisticated!  I've never been to such a "grown up" event, so I was pretty excited to get to wear my black prom dress again ;).  Unfortunately, I forgot my camera and didn't get any pictures of the night!  I have some bad-quality cell phone pictures, but it doesn't do anything justice.  The pictures you see now are from re-visiting the building the next morning, with my mom.

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So, anyway, I spent most of the day on Friday preparing for our unofficial after-Gala event - the anti-event!  Julie (my date for the evening!) and I really enjoyed the irony in the party hopping we did.  I present to you our menu for the evening:

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The petit fours took the longest to make - about 2 days.  I deviated a bit from the original recipe listed above, starting with the Magnolia Bakery Vanilla Cupcake recipe, baked as a sheet cake, as the base.  From the birthday cake mentioned in a previous post, I found layers were extremely easy to cut when using this recipe, so I didn't want to risk anything new!  Especially trying to balance making all of this between classes and meetings.

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The focaccia recipe's already made a debut at the Apartment Warming party, made by Chris both times!  It's a huge crowd pleaser every time - everyone's usually surprised that it tastes so good, since the idea of grapes on pizza dough is a bit strange at first.  I LOVE this stuff, and it was definitely a hit at the party.

DSC03375 (Can't have a classy party without champagne!)

2 comments:

Jessica said...

awww Natalie! I love that you have classy dinner parties! hahaha no one else I know does that yet :-P I wish I could come to them!
and all the food sounds amaaaazing as usual! I need to try that grape foccacia stuff sometime.

Mom said...

What a party it looked like! Yes, the new Performing Arts bldg cost far,far too much for a school that doesn't specialize in a major for it. I would like to see how many scholarships would have been available for even a third of the building's cost!!!!! But no one cares about the middle class in America, we just pay and pay and pay..
Ok, no politics.

Mom