Sarah's Birthday Dinner

I'd like to think one of the things that our house in Exeter is famous for is throwing a cracking party...especially birthdays. In October we hosted over 100 people in our small student house as well as a fab firework display for Katie's birthday... Sophia and Frankie were presented with a champagne breakfast... So now it was our time to show our best friend Sarah (a.k.a. Saz) a good time and make sure we lived up to our reputation! What better way to have an amazing night then host a dinner party?

As I mentioned before, 16 Queen's Crescent never fails to produce a good party and we definitely pulled out all the stops for Saz- this very much includes canapes and a bit of cava-obviously! Will revealed some delicious cocktail sausages and we were very happy sipping on our cava which Saz's parents kindly donated for the evening (as obviously we're students and can only otherwise afford Tesco's Finest). 

Danvers obviously enjoying his canape and cava.

Let's be honest our living room (more like corridor) isn't the nicest, so we thought we'd spice it up a bit with some decorations. 

However before dinner was served, I whipped off my apron (jokes) for a quick little photo shoot....

Which obviously some didn't take quite as seriously as others....

Believe it or not I actually went to school with two of these girls and I live with two of them...nightmare

You'd never know but the boys are often worse at posing...blue steel boys.

So, back to the kitchen. As designated chefs of the house Frankie and I prepared a fab beef and horseradish stew with dauphinoise potatoes and a bit of broc which was delicious and super easy. (let's not forget Will, who was adamant he should be mentioned for slicing the onions- well done Will.) It turned out to be such a treat! I've learned many a lesson from my wise mother, the main one being that when you host a dinner party, "you'll want to spend as much time with your guests" so a stew is perfect for this. Started on it at 5pm and then let it do it's thing until serving it up at 9pm.

You'll probably know already how much I adore this new Creme Egg Chocolate Brownie recipe (check out the recipe here) so obviously these were whipped up by Sophia and Frankie for Saz's birthday cake.

A few bottles of wine later and we all began to very much enjoy ourselves...

....especially Will...

As the only two boys in our house of 5 other girls they seemed to over compensate for their masculinity. It definitely took more than a few shots to get a good one!

  

Yes, believe it or not I live with these two...

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