Somehow, over the weekend at the baby shower (not for me – just thought I’d throw that in there as a disclaimer in case people thought I’d been keeping a huge secret), I managed to take pictures of all the food we had spent the week prepping and the games the guests played, but none of the people! Thus this post is more “Tips for Throwing a Baby Shower” rather than “Here’s What Happened at the Baby Shower.”

Food

The shower was held on Saturday, so this meant that all week there was prep to do. Wednesday meant making cupcakes. We spent the afternoon mixing up three different kinds – chocolate, lemon and strawberry. The chocolate cupcakes came from Ina Garten’s The Barefoot Contessa cookbook. For years, this has been my go-to chocolate cake recipe – it’s amazing, and it really needs to be put together as-is. I’ve had to make modifications to it every now and then because I forgot an ingredient, but it really works best when followed as-is (but if you’re trying to make it a little “healthier,” you could sub yogurt for the sour cream – but this is a cake… my theory has always been you might as well go for it; I’m not eating cake because I’m looking for healthy option!). The chocolate cakes were topped with chocolate icing.

The lemon cupcakes were also an Ina Garten recipe, from her Parties cookbook. This is another amazing cake, usually make in pound cake form and then drizzled with lemony syrup and then topped with glaze, however they work just as well as cupcakes (I’ve got it a couple of times). If you like lemon-based desserts, this is definitely one to try. In this case, we put the syrup on top of the cakes (usually it goes on the bottom, but as these were cupcakes, we weren’t able to access the bottoms of them) and it soaked down into the cakes. They were dopped off by a small dollop of icing just to give them a little extra edge.

The strawberry cupcakes were partially a recipe and partially a new creation we made up. The strawberries were dehydrated and then ground into the flour to make what I guess you could call “strawberry flour.” The recipe we used can be found here. The only modification was the strawberries in the flour (though I’m not sure how much strawberry “powder” was actually used in the end). In any case, the cakes came out a bit dense, but really tasted like strawberry – they were really good. These were topped with a vanilla-cream cheese icing, and another slice of dehydrated strawberry.

Other desserts included shortbread cookies and carrot cupcakes, all made by other party guests who were kind enough to help out!

For the non-dessert foods, we went with tea sandwiches and various salads. The following photos are just a few samples of the sandwiches:

We also had a Mixed Berry Salad, a Pineapple Salad, Caprese Pasta Salad, Cucumber Sandwiches, Radish-Mint Sandwiches, and a vegetable crudite to top everything off. We were sending people home with food when the party was over.

Games

Every baby shower needs some fun games to keep the guests entertained. We didn’t want to play some of the more traditional ones, such as disallowing anyone to say the word baby. So we scoured the internet for some more creative options. Being artistic people, we gravitated towards those that allowed guests to bring their creativity to the table. The first, and perhaps most useful, was “Decorate-a-Onesie.” I bought four different sizes of onesies and fabric markers, so that these items can actually be useful.

In addition to this game, we also had “Sculpt-a-Baby” in which guests created babies out of play-dough. Much hilarity ensued with these creations:

All in all, it was a great success!