Manicures & Mimosas

 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.