Heart Shaped Cucumber Sandwiches for Valentine’s Day Tea or Spa Party

February 8, 2017 2 Comments A Well Crafted Pantry

These cucumber sandwiches were originally featured in my Valentine’s Spa Day Lunch post with FREE PRINTABLES! You might have also saw them on KATU’s Afternoon Live. They are both tasty and famous! 😉 Big thank you to my friend Alicia who helped me prep everything for the TV shoot and put together these beautiful sandwiches for photographs!

Valentine’s Day for me is a time to celebrate all of the people I love, not just my husband. Each year I try to come up with at least a fun valentine to share with friends, coworkers, and my children. This year I went a little further and came up with a party designed to celebrate the very busy, kind, and often stressed women in my life. I had the opportunity to share the Valentine’s Spa Day Lunch on KATU’s Afternoon Live and here on the blog.

Heart Shaped Cucumber Sandwiches

One of the tasty recipes that I put together for the party is this heart shaped cucumber sandwich. Cucumber sandwiches are known mainly as a go-to for tea parties. However, because I love the little sandwiches and feel like spa days and cucumbers go hand in hand, I thought it would make for a nice light lunch item for either a Valentine’s Day Tea Party or a Valentine’s Spa Party. I think these sandwiches would also be great for a wedding shower, bachelorette tea, baby shower, or a tea-time reception.

The recipe is pretty simple and can be adjusted to taste. If you are really stressed for time then substitute the cream cheese mixture below with a ready-made herbed cream cheese. I personally like my cucumber sandwiches on a nice white bread, but feel free to change the bread to any that you prefer. I use a heart shaped cookie cutter to cut out my hearts taking a knife to trim the edges if needed. Metal cookie cutters work best for this, but really, any cookie cutter will do.

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Don’t forget to hop on over to the main Valentine’s Day Spa Lunch post to get your free party printables!

A Well Crafted Party

Valentine’s Spa Day Lunch + Free Printables

February 6, 2017 4 Comments A Well Crafted Party

Valentine’s Day for me is all about love (of course) but, it is often about having the opportunity to tell my friends that I love them in addition to my husband. I was always a fan of giving out Valentine’s at school. This year I really wanted to focus on self-care and sharing with my friends an opportunity to take some moments out of the day to enjoy some very much needed “me time” with a few friends.

See these party tips on my spot on KATU’s Afternoon Live:

The Valentine’s Spa Day Lunch features a menu of light foods and sweet treats complimented with sparkling wine and cucumber lemon water. It is a perfectly laid back party that includes chatting with friends over a glass of sparkling wine while manicures are drying. If you really want to make this something special, hire a massage therapist or manicurist to come and treat your guests!

Spa Day Lunch Menu:

Salads served in champagne flutes
Heart Shaped Cucumber Tea Sandwiches
Strawberry Cake Truffles
Sparkling Rose Jello Hearts
Sparkling Rose’ served with Strawberry Hearts
Cucumber Lemon Water

Valentine’s Spa Day Lunch Activities:

DIY Bath Salts (Get your free printable below – Check back soon for tutorial!)
Rose Shaped Hand Towels (Check back soon for tutorial!)
Manicures/ Pedicures

Valentine’s Spa Day Favor Idea:

DIY Manicure Kits with soap, nail polish, and nail kits. Use the free printable tag below.

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Free Printables for Valentine’s Spa Day

Click here -> Download a free customizable PDF invitation <- Click here

Directions: Add your information into the text boxes. You can do this using Adobe Acrobat or even do it in the Chrome browser! Print back and front on card stock in full-color. If you are doing on a home printer you may need to adjust your printer settings to line up the front and back artwork. The card is made with a .25 inch bleed which means you have a quarter of an inch to cut into the design. This helps bring the design all the way to the end of the page. Once cut it will fit in an A7 card.

Click here ->Download free Bath Salt tags <- Click here

Directions: Print on card stock in full color. Cut out each circle. Place this circle in between the lid and the ring of a canning jar or punch a hole in it and tie onto a bag.

Click here -> Download free Valentine’s Day Tags <- Click here

Directions: Print on card stock in full color. Cut out each circle, punch a hole into the circle, and attach with ribbon on a gift. Alternatively, print on sticker paper, cut out, and stick to your gift.

A Well Crafted Pantry

Brunch Potluck — Portland Bloggers’ Meet-Up

March 16, 2016 5 Comments A Well Crafted Pantry

The Portland Bloggers, a local bloggers meet-up group and resource, hosted a Valentine’s Day brunch potluck this past month. We were happy to have decoration supplied by Minted.Com and tasty mimosas with Santa Margherita Wines. All thoughts and opinions are my own. To see my sponsored posting guidelines please visit my policies page. Thank you to Jennifer Landers for helping us find a swanky venue and Suzannah Stanley for these fab photos!

What kind of potluck should I host? …. BRUNCH!

When you live in Portland you tend to come around to the amazing-ness that is B-R-U-N-C-H. You see, it may have to do something with the rain and the grey skies or perhaps it is the laid back nature of this town… but, getting up early in the morning and heading out to breakfast really is just not our thing. Yes, it happens. Yes, there are people that seem to make it out of the house before 10 AM. Those are the people who get to walk right in and sit down for a tasty meal with no wait.

The rest of us, well, we do brunch and we do it hard. We have some of the most amazing restaurants out there creating brunch menus just for us. Heck, even the amazing Gregory Gourdet of Departure (you may know him from Top Chef) is getting into some brunch mischief with a pop-up brunch feature this Easter. Personally, I love brunch. There is something about the perfect mix of sweet and savory breakfast food paried with a breakfast cocktail all while fully rested. My love of brunch is one of the many reasons why we decided our recent Portland Bloggers meet-up was going to be a brunch potluck. One of the other reasons is that brunch is perfect for a potluck.

Brunch Potluck Food

There was such a great variety of foods and treats. I love brunch foods for potlucks because they can be savory or sweet. Great brunch potluck foods include mini bagels with cream cheese, quiches, muffins, waffle bites, deviled eggs… the list goes on and on! And for this particular brunch, because we hosted the party near Valentine’s Day, there were a lot of sweet treats on top of the great brunch foods.

Brunch Potluck Beverages

One of my favorite parts of any party is the beverage choices. Because we were having a brunch, we felt mimosas were a must! Santa Margherita wines sent us some of their Prosecco to try out. The crisp Santa Margherita Prosecco was stationed in a ice bucket ready to pair with either orange juice, peach puree, or strawberry puree. My favorite pairing was with the peach puree because the lightly tart taste of the Prosecco brought out the bright and juicy flavors of the peach. We also had plenty of sparkling water to pair with the juices to round out our beverage selection.

Beautiful and EASY Party Decor

We decorated the meeting space using Minted’s Party Suites. Seriously, such an easy and beautiful solution to party decor. You simply pick your suite, customize and purchase and then a neat little party package comes to your door complete with custom items, paper straws, plates, and napkins! We chose the Valentine’s Ombre Love Party Decor in the Perfect Party package. The mini note cards made for perfect labels for the food for the potluck. The banner is such great quality of paper that I’ll be keeping it to use over and over again at upcoming Portland Blogger meet-ups.

What makes potlucks so great?

I go on and on about potlucks like they are the butter to my bread… but, heres the thing, hosting parties can be quite expensive. Going out to eat and be expensive. Heck, even a drink or two at a bar can break the bank at times. Hosting events potluck style gives everyone the opportunity to gather together to enjoy a meal while not sticking one person with the check. I love the laid back feel of potlucks. I enjoy getting to try the items that other people bring. To be perfectly honest, in the end, I love not paying for everything. Cheers to whoever invented the very first potluck—those cavemen and women who all came to the table with something to share. Cheers also to the awesome guests that came to this potluck. They brought their A-game in the food and networking departments!