A Mad Men cocktail party!

This Friday's baking was dictated by the evenings planned activities. Neil and I had decided to host a Mad Men Cocktail party to show of some vintage furniture and housewares including a Chiswell drinks cabinet, a sideboard, a groovy two globed lamp, some etched whisky glasses and a record player. I'm also quite taken with late 50's and early 60's fashion and wanted to try my hand at making a 'Joanie' style wiggle dress.

So after boxing down at Bronte beach I was off to the shops for cocktail party supplies. We were planning to serve Moscow Mules, Tom Collin's and a 1970's blow in the Cosmopolitan. In addition we planned to serve up a selection of cocktail food inspired by my mother-in-laws 1952 edition of "The Hostess Cook Book" by Helen M Cox with a few more modern pieces thrown in. This book is a goldmine of suggested menus and matching recipes. Both cocktail and buffet dinner menus came in useful and I came up with  mixture of menus to include: deviled eggs, sandwiches, savory puffs, a selection of toothpick food including: cocktail onions, cubed cheese, gherkins, cabanosii and meatballs; party pies, chicken bites and vegetable samosa. In addition I had planned to cook a few of my favorite past recipes such as choc-orange almond cupcakes, chocolate eclairs and zucchini and carrot slice. And of course the sandwiches can be made with my favorite gluten free bread.

Well it took me until about 2pm to finish sewing my dress after quite a bit of cursing trying to get the zipper right and to work out to do blind hem stitch on the machine as I was too lazy to do it by hand. I must say for my first ever dress made by customising my first ever purchased pattern I was rather impressed with how the dress worked out. I must say I am really glad I went with the dusty pink pin wale cord over the pink and grey check as it would have been a nightmare to cut and sew to match up the pattern. And I'm thankful that simplicity patterns have good instructions and when my limited sewing failed my I had my sewing bible. Phew. Anyway here is a little picture of the dress.

After the dress was finished it was into the kitchen and to start baking. The first thing I decided to make was a double batch of choux pastry as per the recipe provided last week with one minor adaption to omit the sugar so it could be used for savoury fillings. I also chose to make half of the mixture into little balls with a small spoonful of dough to make little puffs and the others into small little fingers for the eclairs. And this time it was a delight to see them puff up nicely in an oven that I could control the temperature properly!

Now it was a bit of a stressful afternoon as Neil had to join me in the kitchen as we had quite a bit to do. We have a such a small kitchen with hardly any bench space but we managed with only a couple of tense moments. Neil made devilled eggs and meatballs with a mix of ginger, garlic, tamari, oyster sauce, egg and rice crumbs while I made up a large batch of carrot and zucchini slice and a batch of choc-orange cupcakes. And once with most of the baking done we had to get ready before our first guests arrived. I still had my hair in rollers when my friend Dee turned up. She'd come early to borrow a dress and help set up so we were both in aprons making sandwiches whipping up cream and filling puffs and eclairs.

And all three of us were still hard at it pulling together plates of sandwiches, toothpick food and other nibbles when more of our guests arrived. Luckily they also pitched in in setting things up and opening the bar and making our first batch of Moscow Mules. Then finally things we all in order - my hair was out of rollers and the food was out and we all had drinks in our hands and the socialising could begin. Phew it was a bit of an effort for us all but well worth it to get people together and catch up. Not to mention we got to dress up and drink cocktails like characters out of Mad Men!