After almost an entire year in this year in this Pandemic, I am going a bit crazy. Missing my friends and our monthly dinners together, but thankful we can at least see each other once a month online. For this month's monthly dinner, I wanted to support one of my good friends (and monthly dinner ladies) who sells Color Street nail strips. I decided to make my theme Manicures & Mimosas. Honesty...who doesn't love a mimosa at any time of day!
Invite: I found a simple image of a mimosa online that I really liked and designed my invitation around that. Nothing super fancy with this one.
Party Details: At a Manicures & Mimosa party, you of course have to serve mimosas. I bought some mini bottles of champagne and mini bottles of orange juice to give each guest. I created a label for the orange juice that matched the invite. I added a fun message to the label encouraging guests to get "on a juice cleanse...drink mimosas!"
I gave each guest a plastic champagne flute, but dressed them up a little by folding a yellow napkin inside and crafting a paper orange slice to garnish the rim. I used my Cricut machine to create the orange, made a cut with scissors in the middle, and then slid the slice on the rim of the glass.
Menu: Mimosas are most often served with breakfast and brunch, so that is the menu that I designed even though this was for dinner. It was all delicious no matter what time of day we ate!
We started with a Bacon, Egg, and Cheese Strata. I found the recipe here. We really enjoyed this recipe, and I loved how easy it was to make. I used a large uncut loaf of herb seasoned bread instead of a baguette. I also added more bacon than it says, but I love bacon. Otherwise, I stuck to the recipe. Loved that I could make this a day ahead, leave it in the fridge, and then add the toppings and bake it right before the party.
I served a fruit salad on the side. The fruit salad had watermelon, blueberries, green grapes, cantaloupe, and strawberries. It was a nice light addition to the meal.
For a breakfast "dessert," I made Cinnamon Roll Muffins. I followed this recipe here. These were tasty. I tried to follow the recipe exactly, but honestly had trouble with the cinnamon swirl. I am not an expert baker or anything, so maybe most people are able to do exactly what the recipes says, but I found my mixture thick and not able to swirl at all. The recipe says to heat it more if this is the case, but that didn't work for me. I even added a little more butter, but it was a very similar consistency. I think my cinnamon rolls cupcakes looked fine and tasted fine, they just didn't have the swirl look as much as the original photos in this recipe show.
I wrapped up my muffins since these Pandemic dinners have to be online rather than together. I placed each muffin on a lemon coaster. I picked these up years ago in the Target dollar bin and new I would use them someday!
I created a tag for my muffins and sealed the bags with a fun yellow ribbon.
Favor: My good friend that sells Color Street nail strips donated all the items for the favor. She included a scratch off discount card, two sample pairs of nail strips, a nail file, and two tools that are perfect for applying Color Street. I created a fun tag - "A Mimosa a day keeps the worries away. A manicure every weeks helps too!"
We had a great time on Zoom together to end the night showing off our nails & laughing with friends. It has been of year of these dinners on Zoom rather than in person. Hoping to get back to in person events in the near future.
