Cloud 9

  A few weeks/months ago we celebrated Kirsty's 40th birthday.  The theme?........ "Cloud 9"
  - and whilst we were encouraged to dress in vintage clothes or vintagey colours, the venue was already slotted well into the vintage era - by age and not by looks but Kirsty had a vision of what it could and would look like and she transformed the room into a magical loveliness.

The walls and ceiling were completed covered with black fabric - metres and metres of it - with hundreds of twinkling fairy lights and many tissue paper clouds hanging through the room.

Chandeliers, candelabras & lamps provided the lighting and

vintage tableware including water jugs and glasses filled the tables.

We settled into our seats and enjoyed the delicious meal.

                                                Marion, Kirsty and me

Kirsty's children were our waitresses and waiter, and her husband
was as debonair as ever

Nameplaces were little swans, with a name wrapped macaron sitting in their backs
and we'd filled lovely dishes full of macarons and had them dotted down the tables.

By the end of the night we were all wearing our wings - even my husband was happy to be photographed with them on.

My job was to make macarons and once started on the lovely pastel colours it was hard to stop. I must say that the photos taken of the mounds of gelati coloured macarons looked fabulous. The fillings included white chocolate ganache with pureed raspberry, salted caramel, lemon butter and milk chocolate with nectarine.

Marion made Kirsty's birthday cake - covered with edible shiny stars,
macarons and persian fairy floss
(I made the cake stand - thanks to the inspiration of Sue and Melissa, using a crystal platter and an upturned dessert bowl.  The cake stand was actually a Kitchen tea present for my new "niece-in-law" and as often the case, I now want one like it too!)

She's got 10 years to plan for her 50th, wonder what she'll do to top this party?!

Colours

I spent some time on the weekend baking macarons (after my class in Paris) - it took a while to get the oven temperature and timing just right but now I am happy with the results. The dark purple and pistachio ones were a bit undercooked and lavender ones a bit lumpy, whilst the other 3 batches were pretty good.

Even when you don't get them looking just perfect they still taste lovely.

The pink ones were filled with a strawberry champagne buttercream, the mauve and purple ones with lemon butter, the brown ones with salted caramel and the teal ones with a honey and maple syrup caramel with bacon.

I did another batch of the pistachio green macarons, trying to keep my piping size even. There were a few 'oops' - es. This batch turned out perfectly and they were filled with mint chocolate ganache.

Important thing to remember is that when using food colours to watch where else it can spread to.......this is partially cooked chicken with some blue spots!

And there was also the case of husband's white shirt......yes I was doing the washing in between baking!