Carol Hartery's Creations: Happy Birthday Robbie!

Good Morning Everyone!

We are celebrating Robbie’s 27^th birthday this afternoon. In our family you choose the menu and theme of your birthday party. Robbie said he wanted summer fare and a squirrel theme. So we’re having unfried chicken, potato salad, cole slaw, corn on the cob, green beans, cupcakes, fresh fruit cup, ice cream and “acorns”.

My potato salad recipe is a festive one that’s been adapted from a recipe I found and later lost from the Boston Globe. It’s made with red skin potatoes, celery, carrots, red peppers, red onions, Cains mayonnaise, red wine vinegar and parsley. It’s colorful and delicious and is one of Rob’s favorites.

Robbie also loves the cole slaw that we make about once a week during the summer. I use my food processor to shred a head of cabbage and about 4 carrots. Then I add about a cup of raisins and a jar of Marie’s Cole Slaw Dressing. It’s sweet and tangy and oh, so good.

We eat fresh fruit salad all year long. Fruits seem to taste even better when they are mixed up with each other. The fruits that we use vary from week to week depending upon what’s in season and what’s on sale.

I found a wonderful idea for squirrel cupcakes in What’s New Cupcake? by Karen Tack and Alan Richardson, but decided it was a little too complicated to use during this hot humid weekend. I did, however, create some of their adorable “acorns” from page 96. They’re made with mini vanilla wafers, Hershey Kisses, and chocolate decorating icing. They really do look like an acorn. They’re a fun little extra that people can just pop into their mouths.

I whipped up a batch of cupcakes, frosted them with green “grass”, sprinkled on some toffee bits, and added adorable cupcake picks that I created by using some Lawn Fawn stamps and papers. The tree and the squirrel are from Lawn Fawn’s “Critter in the Burbs” clear stamp set. “Happy Birthday” is from Lawn Fawn’s “Hats Off to You” clear stamp set. I fussy cut and paper pieced the tree and then fussy cut the squirrels and added one to each tree along with a toothpick so I could “plant” the tree in the grass. The leafy green treetops were created from scraps of green papers from Lawn Fawn’s “Bright Side” paper collection. I used “tree trunk” papers from My Mind’s Eye to create the tree trunks. Some squirrels are running up the tree. Others are running down the tree or across the foliage.

Robbie loves trail mix so I tossed roasted peanuts, sunflower seeds, m&m’s, and raisins together and filled little baggies with the mixture. I used the template for the “Around the Town” small tote from PaperTrey Ink and some tree trunk papers from My Mind’s Eye to create tiny treat bags for the trail mix. I decorated each bag with additional tree trunks and squirrels.

I used a balloon stamp from the Hero Arts “Wonderful Birthday” clear stamp set and a clear squirrel stamp from Technique Tuesday to create a quick and simple card for Robbie.