Kitchen Tea - the quiz

My sister E put together a quiz for my guests. I had requested no silly games, as I tend to find them annoying when I attend these kinds of parties. Then again, maybe it was my chance to exact revenge and I missed out on the opportunity! Bummer.

At any rate, the following questions were asked. Two friends were tied on seven apiece and we went into the tie breaker. My favourite bra type was all that split the two in the end!

Kirsty Quiz
1. When was Kirsty born?
2. What is her middle name?
3. Favourite food?
4. Favourite type of tea?
5. Favourite TV Show?
6. Where did Chad propose?
7. Did he go down on one knee?
8. Where is the honeymoon?
9. Where are Kirsty and Chad building their new house?
10. How many nieces & nephews does Kirsty have?

Tie breakers
1. Where did Kirsty meet Chad?
2. What is her favourite charity?
3. What is her favourite underwear label?

Kitchen Tea - the guests

My mother graciously let us hold my kitchen tea at her place. All of my bridesmaids have relatively small abodes, and it would have been quite tight with the number of people we were inviting. Mum and Dad have a fairly large covered area at their place and it was great in case of contingency - rain or sunshine and we were set!

Dad disappeared for the afternoon and left us in peace. He made sure to come home though while there were still cakes on the table...

Thank you to my lovely bridesmaids for all their hard work and effort at organising, and to Mum for letting us crash your backyard! A marvellous day was had by all.

E conducting the Kirsty Quiz. I will post it shortly - see how you stack up!


Guests busily trying to remember my favourite colour.


Chocolate or strawberry? Hmmm....


Mum wishing that she was allowed to enter. "I know all of these answers. I would win!"


My lovely sister and me.

Kitchen Tea - the food

My bridesmaids organised a kitchen tea for me. Given my love of afternoon tea it was a given that I would appreciate something special! Bridesmaid N cooked up an absolute storm, and in the days before my kitchen tea she won awards for her baking at one of the local shows! I was privileged to have some of those award winning recipes baked for my day.

There were a few people who contributed to the tasty treats on the table. N was most prolific, with plates of biscuits, eclairs, fruit tart, cake, and cute cupcakes. M made curry puffs, sandwiches and a madeira cake. My MIL made two types of caramel slice, and P brought along her famous corn salsa dip.

We were all well catered for! To wash it all down were cups of tea and a fruit punch that Mum made.


My sister picked up these cake toppers in the US when she visited earlier this year.


Yum chocolate cupcakes with a burst of white!!


These gorgeous fruit tarts were the first to disappear. I only managed to taste one!


Award winning biscuits. Yeeha!

Hiatus

We are caught up now between Christmas and New Year. The writing of thank you cards is a more laborious process than I had anticipated - I have written 20 out of 66!! Phew. And then Christmas cards to write and send...

Yesterday we picked up our proof book from our photographer. It is a weighty tome - 187 pages of photos. Wow! We also have a DVD of all of our photos at 12Mb (or maybe 12 Megapixels, I cannot remember what he said and I have not looked at the files). At any rate rather large! We have to choose around 100 photos for our album. That will be a job for after Christmas I think...

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Preserving your wedding cake!

After all of the hassles and running around that we had for our cake, C and I were very happy with the result! The lady who decorated our cake asked us to head out to her place (a 45 minute drive from home!) so that we could see it and let her know what we thought. We were happy to do so, although figured that there was not much that we could do the day before the wedding other than nod and smile if we did not like it!

We loved it! We were very happy with our cake and it surpassed our expectations. S had found a space for all of the icing flowers that Mum had purchased (which would make Mum happy!), and had added some colour through the use of blue and silver dots. I had been able to provide S with fabric samples from the dresses of two of our bridesmaids and she used these as a guide for the colour of the circles. She complemented the flowers with silver leaves and ended up using icing on the base of each layer rather than ribbon.

We did not manage to eat any cake on the day (tip: cut the cake early in the reception rather than towards the end, to give the kitchen time to cut it and serve it up!) and I made up for that the day after our wedding. Yum! I love fruit cake and this was extra special and rich, with dates and apricots and almonds and all sorts of good things. Only the bottom tier was cut, and not all of that served, so we have lots of cake to see us through the next few years.

As we were heading off onto our honeymoon the next day, we postponed preparing our cake for long term storage and ended up putting the two full tiers and remainder of the third tier into one of our car fridges. The warmest that we could set it to was 11C and so they sat in that environment for two weeks. This last week we scrambled around looking for containers large enough for each tier and ended up calling upon the services of my tupperware friend to find us something suitable. Yay!

Today we wrapped both up in two layers of gladwrap, then a layer of alfoil, placed them into the tupperware and into the deep freezer. Fingers crossed the tupperware will protect them from picking up any freezer smells. (They are in the bait freezer.)

I have read a few different websites with varying opinions on the best way to preserve the wedding cake, and also different opinions on the sucecss of freezing icing! At any rate we have frozen ours with the icing intact and we shall see how it goes. The response on this forum seems to indicate that freezing the icing should be okay, and our cake decorator also suggested that we freeze it. S had not had experience herself with freezing the cakes but she did tell us that it had been recommended by one of her colleagues, and also that she had issues with icing left out of the fridge/freezer going rancid due to humidity. S advised that the icing was more likely to go off before the cake!

Image C Photography

Lovely ladies

My beautiful bridesmaids and me. All dressed up with somewhere to go!!

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Unsubscribed

I just unsubscribed to all of the wedding blogs that I never found the time to read anyway! It feel relief that I no longer feel that I have to maintain my subscription just in case they posted an idea that I would use.

I am still reading the blogs of fellow brides, I do enjoy reading their stories and ideas and ups and downs and seeing how they go through the process. It is nice to read about the joys and laughs of other brides!

Over the next week or so I will post pictures of our day and the bits and pieces from the leadup until our wedding. I still have to post photos from my kitchen tea and hen's night! Terrible. C goes back to work on Thursday so I should have a little more spare time to devote to documenting our wedding.

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Photos!

We are back from our honeymoon (photos later) and a surprise waiting for us was a sample of the official photos from our wedding! So exciting! Yay!

I love C's blue cufflinks, they are such a statement. My sister E won them for him! Apparently his groomsmen were giving him grief about them however I put it down to their lack of fashion sense and style!

Image C Photography

Bridesmaid pretties

It seems that a common gift for bridesmaids is to give them the jewellery that they will wear on the day. I was hoping to give my bridesmaids something a little quirky that they might hopefully wear again, so I turned to my sister for ideas. She is usually good for items that are interesting and fashionable!

Her suggestion was the mini necklaces by Victoria Mason. These are beautiful charms and I had trouble narrowing it down to three! With a little more help from E I ended up selecting these three treasures.



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A sweet thank you

Our bomboniere were fairly simple. I had tried to think of something creative and interesting and useful and gave up. It was back to chocolate, and in the search for simple E and I came across Whistlers at the Perth Upmarket. They were offerering a 90g block of creamy milk chocolate at a price that was within our budget and I could see that labelling them would be fairly simple. They fit the criteron for locally made, and although I am trying to steer myself towards fair trade chocolate I thought that our guests would be more appreciative of the local product.

At the time that we ordered the chocolates, we planned to use them as our individualised table name settings as well and it all tied in.

Mum and I went into the factory store to speak to Whistlers about ordering the bars, and see if there was a discount for ordering in bulk! Rina was very friendly and she suggested that they wrap the bars in coloured foil, rather than the cellophane of the trial block that E and I had bought.

We thought that this would be a great idea and selected two blues and silver to complement our bridal colours. The chocolates are made to order and this means that they we fresh for our guests!

I toyed with several ideas for labels - my original thought was to use parchment paper to print labels and wrap these around the bars. I then tried to think of ways to incorporate a swing tag style label, and to use our lovely chiyogami paper. In the end though I went back to the wrap around lable but used the vellum that we had made our invitations with. I printed a thank you message for our guests and Chad and I spent part of an evening wrapping and sticking them around the bars. They looked so pretty when we had finished!

The morning after - part 2

New little sister
Partying hard. Already
borrowing my clothes

For better haiku, check out my (other) sister E's blog. She is much more lyrical than I.

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The morning after

It feels so surreal, the morning after.

Today we marvelled in the state of marriage, unwrapped gifts, sat around waiting for groomsmen suits to return tomorrow, and picked up our wedding cake.

We missed having a piece, yesterday. Today though there is time to enjoy the cake and each other's company.

Tying a tie

We're at the pointy end now, and the groom and groomsmen all need to look their best!

The only time that ties come out of the drawer in our house is for my work balls. Chad likes to do it right and we head straight to the internet for instructions on how to tie the perfect tie.

Here's hoping that they all manage the intricacies for the wedding, none of the boys are regular tie wearers so it will be fun to see how they go.

Bucks and crays

A trip to Rottnest for the start of the Crayfish season (15th November here in WA!) seemed like the perfect platform for a bucks show. C and several of his mates went over on Sunday - four boats in total - for the start of the season on Monday. The windy weather meant that they were not able to access their usual spots and the haul was a measly 6 amongst the three of them who dove. There had been some shark activity recently in the area and not all of the boys were game enough to get into the water!

Rottnest is one of the places that I want to visit more frequently - we have the means to get over there and we can chuck our bikes onto the boat to get around once we are there. Maybe this summer...

Cake giveaway

Local Perth cake decorator extraordinaire Delicate-Lee is giving away a wedding cake to a lucky Perth bride! See here for more details. It sounds delicious - three layers of chocolate fudge covered in more chocolate.

Kaylee's cakes are beautiful creations, check them out on her blog.