Need a delicious, unique, simple to prepare, crowd pleasing appetizer for a party?  Then try making these Pistachio and Goat Cheese Grape Truffles!  I made these for the Baby Shower I blogged about yesterday and they were a hit!  This recipe was given to me by Sue from Inspire, Fashion and Photography (she blogs about trendy fashion that catches her eye and has cute pics of her adorable baby girl as well)!

Ingredients

40 red (or green) seedless grapes
2 packs (1.5 ounce) goat cheese
1/2 cup shelled pistachios, finely chopped

Directions

1. Take a grape one by one and roll the goat cheese all around like a little ball.

2. Then take the grape with goat cheese around it and roll it in the pistachio nut mix.

3. Serve in whole truffle form or cut in half.

4. Truffles can be stored in fridge for up to a week.

Was that easy or what??  So easy that I probably didn’t need to show you a picture tutorial of it, oh well, at least I got to practice my food photography, yea??    These little bites are sweet, salty and sassy… and rather unexpected that a grape is inside if served in whole form, I love surprising people!

A few weekends ago, a couple girls and I hosted a pink + yellow baby shower for our friends Lai and Billy.  I played planner, host, cook, decorator, photographer and couldn’t have felt more in my element.

Isn’t the mommy-to-be at 31 weeks so absolutely radiant?  I love the contrast of the yellow rubber ducky against her hot pink dress, that’s the photo I’ll be linking up to Sweet Shot Tuesdays this week!

We hung up onesies and tissue paper pom poms for decoration across the living room.  And of course props to Martha Stewart for providing us with the  tissue paper pom poms tutorial!  These were soooo fun and quite simple to make, you can bet I’ll be making more in the near future!

And since food photography is my dream, I couldn’t leave you without some pictures of the delicious food!  Here’s the full menu:

Ham and Cheese Tea Sandwich
Cucumber Tea Sandwich – will post pictured directions + recipe soon
Pistachio and Goat Cheese Grapes – will post pictured directions + recipe soon
Brazilian Cheese Bread
Fruit Skewers
Lemon Cupcakes with Cherry Frosting
Banana Pudding
Strawberry Pie
Pineapple Pie
Brownie with Strawberry Cheesecake Ice Cream
Fruit Punch – Orange Juice w/ Pineapple Chunks
Pop

Thanks to everyone who helped make the food! 

Then the games commenced, the first one being “Which Male Can Drink The Apple Juice Out Ot the Baby Bottle Fastest In One Minute?“

Are you kidding me??  That’s all you guys could chug in a minute??  Hehe just kidding, I tried it afterwards and it’s not an easy feat, props to babies!

Then we played “Who Can Guess the Circumference of the Mommy-To-Be’s Belly?“

Followed by one of my favorites… “Guess What Chocolate Is In The Poopy Diapers?“  We had guests smell, touch, and LICK the chocolate.  Yes I said lick, gross.

And the last game was “Pin the Sperm On The Egg“.  Thanks James for being our egg holder!

And here are our lovely game winners posing with their prizes!  Great job guys!

Then it was present opening time where Baby Chen received tons of onesies, hats, socks, animal towels, and more!

But perhaps the real gift of the shower was having adorable little Natalie’s sweet presence.  Aren’t her blue eyes just soo enchanting?  I can already tell she is going to be beautiful when she grows up!

A few more shots posing with the adorable baby bump!

And as the guests left, we gave them these yellow and pink tin favor boxes filled with candy and tied with a matching tag.  I purchased the tin boxes at Michael’s, basically clearing out our local store.  And tags were designed by Jane Jeon of Olive Hue Paper Goods, as a DIY for Grey Likes Weddings.  I think the tags were originally designed to use for wedding favors, but I thought they’d be perfect for a baby shower favor as well! 

And lastly, we created this “Guess The Birth Date Calendar” for guests to lock in their votes for when they think Baby Chen will be born.  My guess is October 22, because that’s my brother’s birthday!

Congrats again to Lai and Billy!  Can’t wait to meet your beautiful baby girl!

Rain, overcast, space needle, first starbucks, pike place, seafood, ahhh seattle we meet again! I’m so excited to be in this beautiful city witnessing the wedding of C+J. I’d like to think I was a semi-match maker for them since I was already planning on going out with J + friends when I invited C + friends to come along to the bar we were going to as well (this was about 4 years ago)… and the rest is history. I’ve also had a ton of fun helping C with any wedding questions that come along during the planning process. Of course I’ll be taking photos with canon 50d. But for now, I leave you a collection of items from seattle based designers, photographers and basically things that remind me of seattle!

1 christian louboutin “bianca” owned by i am stylish, so pretty!
2 alchemy goods bag (from a local seattle designer) seen on broken saucer
3 luxe clutch by laura bee designs (made in seattle)
4 a warm seattle snuggler by counting stitches
5 adorable it’s a raining cupcakes print by lipeony
6 amazing wedding photo taken by seattle based photographer yvonne wong
7 gold fill hand-wrapped tear drop with prehnite briolette by dotted line jewels
8 parfait organic ice cream truck spotted on the soho
9 darjeeling knot ring made by elephantine
10 pink light design seen on print & pattern

And in case you haven’t heard, there’s a 5 day wedding photography workshop going on right now hosted by the amazing jasmine star! She has loads and loads of useful information about tips on being a great wedding photographer (and just great photography tips in general).  Today is day 3/5 of live streaming videos and she’s actually going to be shooting a REAL WEDDING IN SEATTLE today, so you can follow in her thought process and see all that it takes that goes into shooting a wedding. For more information on the timeline, click here. Don’t worry, if you can’t watch it live, her videos are available for purchase afterwards. Neat stuff!

What are your weekend plans?

And we’re done. HELLO? Did you see that? We’re finally done with our basement renovation! And it only took a year! To see our progress from beginning to end, click here. Of course the last step of the process, laying down the carpet, did not come without a few bumps. We looked high and low at carpet styles, carpet colors, carpet pads, etc. We got prices from multiple stores and it took weeks until we finally landed on one, we had a 20% off coupon which helped too. The carpet we landed on was a light creamy plush carpet where the strands stick straight up. We were sent a samples of the carpet but were sent a different style, it was twisty, also known as frieze. We immediately called our sales guy and said, thanks for the sample but that’s not the carpet style we ordered, we ordered the plush one. He said he’d make sure the computer had the correct one and all was well. We decided to go with it and a few weeks later the carpet installers arrived at our house. The two guys went downstairs and did their thing. Once done, they called up for my husband to come down and look… and the first thing out of my husband’s mouth… “You installed the frieze carpet?” Profanity was strewn from the installer’s mouth. They messed up, they were supposed to verify with my husband before laying the carpet but they did not. But apparently the sales guy didn’t update the computer either… Mind you, I was on a business trip and my husband wrote to me and said “We have a problem. They installed the wrong carpet.” My mind was racing, my heart was beating fast, my husband sent a few pics and I wasn’t so sure about it. Pretty much we had two options: keep the carpet and get a discount or reinstall the whole thing and have to spend another day at home. My husband wanted to wait until I got home to make a decision, and the moment I stepped into the basement, I LOVED THE CARPET! I immediately dug my toes into the threads and laid down on the ground, big sigh of relief! Needless to say, we got a good chunk of money back so that sure was a bonus!

So without further ado, I present to you, our FINALLY finished basement!

As you walk down the stairwell, you’ll first notice the bamboo wallpaper.

And as you turn to the right, we have the wide open space with a beam in the middle and a cozy fireplace.

Say hello to frieze carpet, I just can’t get enough of digging my toes into it!

I just love the big open space without any furniture, maybe we’ll leave it like that for a bit longer. Marvin and I are such pack rats that I know once we start putting stuff back in the basement, it’s going to look cluttered. Although that means we can’t park one of our cars in the garage since it’s currently holding all the furniture… well parking outside is totally fine for summer/fall but I suppose we’ll have want to have that garage space back before it snows yea?

This weeks’ shots are brought to you by my trusty ole Canon Powershot SD770 IS, you know it, I am Canon for life!    I think I probably explained it in a previous post why I did not have my Canon 50D with me, long story short, brought the wrong passport to airport, luckily was rerouted in a later flight, but had to run home and get my correct passport and therefore did not have time to check luggage which meant no room to carry on Canon 50D… so pictures captured on Ottawa trip had to be with my point & shoot.  OK so that was probably the long version of the story right there.  Anyhow, Ottawa had BEAUTIFUL 70 degree weather all week and the downtown (Market) area where we stayed was super cute, tons of great restaurants, historical buildings, and SHOPPING!

Around the National Gallery of Canada Museum, Ottawa sure does have some amazing buildings and sculptures!  I love the composition and lighting of the first shot so I’ll be linking that one up to my3boybarians Sweet Shot Tuesday this week.

But the best view is one of the Parliament and Quebec all in one spot (did a little Light Room editing to these, my trial ends in 3 days, so sad!)

But aside from the amazing architecture, I was told not to miss the Beaver Tails (similar to elephant ears/funnel cake?)… one was a basic Cinnamon Sugar and the other was had warm vanilla icing, sprinkled with Oreo cookie crumbles and drizzled with chocolate sauce, nom nom!

And I also just happened to stumble upon some 3.25% milk and Yogen Fruz  Froyo (they mix the toppings INTO the yogurt) – never seen either of these before!

But what really struck our eyes was the CatsRUs catsitting and cat sympathy baskets car, *meow*