engagement party

My parents threw us an engagement party a few weeekends ago, which was a blast.  It was so fun to see people we don't get to see on a regular basis, and celebrate our engagement with them.  My mom ordered these really cute napkins, in our colors...

 and got me this beautiful corsage--daisies are our flowers...

and my moms best friend and her daughter made this DELICIOUS cupcakes--half were champagne cupcakes, made with strawberry champagne--AMAZING--and the other half were chocolate.  Both were fabulous, and I ate more than I should have!

I wore this super cute Lilly dress, with navy heels, and it was the perfect outfit for our engagement party!  I had such a good time celebrating with everyone, and can't wait for the celebrations to come!

banana coconut bread

Earlier this week, I had a WHOLE LOT of extra bananas and was about to go out of town for the rest of the week, so I figured I'd try to make something out of them instead of having to throw them all way.  My original intent was to make banana muffins, but then I realized I'd left all my cupcake/muffin pans at J's last time I baked there.  However, I still had my mini-muffin pan, so I decided to give mini-muffins a shot.   And then I decided to spice them up by throwing in some chocolate chips and chocolate graham cracker crumbs I had left over from another baking adventure.  Right around the time I finished stirring in the chocolate chips--I remembered that they were MINT chocolate chips.  Surprisingly, the mint-banana combination wasn't awful, but I still had a whole lot of bananas left after that, so I decided to do a little more experimentation, and ended up with banana coconut bread which was delicious!

I used this banana muffin recipe from Cat Can Cook and did it in a 9x9 square pan.  I put down a layer of the batter, put in a layer of coconut, and then another layer of the batter, baked it for 25 or 30 minutes, and was THRILLED with the result!  This is definitely going on my "make again" list!