Throwing an Engagement Party

Now that I've somewhat recovered from our engagement party this weekend, I'd like to share all the ideas and work that went into it! Obviously if I could have it my way, I wanted tiny perfect cupcakes with tiny perfect signs that say our wedding date and "save the date". Unfortunately this didn't happen since I just simply ran out of time! Oh, and I had to scrap an entire batch of "the best red velvet cupcakes" I found on Pinterest because they tasted like playdough. I hate playdough! I ended up buying chocolate cake mix and used my favorite cream cheese icing (Sprinkles recipe) to quickly decorate a bunch of mini cupcakes.

I received a ton of help from my family to set up and cook for the party. We must have had between 25-30 guests there and needed to feed them all but in a fun and not formal way. I was running around so much that day that I forgot to take some pictures of the actual set up of the food but here's what we served:

• Shrimp ceviche
• Antipasto Pasta salad - I doubled this recipe for the amount of people that were there and had tons of leftovers for my coworkers the next Monday, very easy and very tasty
• Stuffed mushrooms - these were amazing but my sister luckily had her husband to help her clean the mushrooms and scoop the filling since this is a rather time consuming meal
• Spinach and Artichoke Dip, tortilla chips, pita chips, and salsa for variety
• Crockpot Sweet & Tangy Meatballs - the recipe also includes a step further for creating meatball sliders but the meatballs alone were such a huge hit, fed a bunch of people, and were complimented on! Do THIS if nothing else. 
• Cupcakes, store bought chocolate and coconut macarons
• Pre-made sandwiches that we set next to a panini grill if anyone wanted a grilled sandwich. This was such a great idea of my sister's and a lot of people did utilize the "panini bar"

Drinks:

• Lots of ice on the side, one tub to cool the beers and another for serving
• Mimosas
• Soda

Antipasto Pasta Salad

Stuffed Mushrooms

Crockpot Meatballs

For the decorations, we made six pom-poms as seen here. I made two white, two sea green, and two peachy/vanilla for variety. It became fluffiness overload inside so we hung two of these outside where people would be hanging out too.  

My proudest decoration would have to be this right here:

It was such a blast having our closest family and friends (only the wedding parties were invited otherwise we'd be on capacity OVERLOAD). For our other friends, we just decided to meet them up for drinks after and there were no hard feelings! Love it.