A Sweet Voice Recital

It's been almost 3 weeks since my first official sweets by sillianah event - I had been a bit hesitant in blogging about it just for the simple fact that due to timing issues, I was unable to take good and proper photos of my sweets...of my hours and hours of hard work. Even so, I felt a post had to be dedicated to this special event.

Back in May, my friend, Ling (aka Fish), sent me an invite on Facebook to her recital, where she would be the piano accompanist to two young male vocalists at the Roslyn Presbyterian Church (where my parents also attend the Taiwanese service). During that same time, I had already begun the process of looking for a professional graphic artist/designer to come up with the logo for sweets by sillianah...which is a whole other story, that I will share another day.

Thoughts and ideas started to brew and I tossed around the idea of collaborating with Fish - why not ask her if she needed some desserts for a reception after the recital? I had a lot of free time on my hands since being unemployed...this would be great experience to have under my belt...wait, was she even planning on having a reception? One thing led to another, and there I was, planning a sweets menu for 80 people!

The menu consisted of items I was confident in making and had made many times, but I also wanted to try a couple new things and in the end, I came up with the following menu:

• Lemon cupcakes w/ lemon cream cheese frosting
• Devil's Food chocolate cupcakes w/ strawberry buttercream frosting
• Salted caramel brownies
• Marbled cheesecake brownies
• Green tea macarons w/ passion fruit buttercream
• Plain almond macarons w/ red/adzuki bean buttercream
• Chocolate macarons w/ raspberry preserves
• Cheesecake square cookies
• Sugar cookies

As if that wasn't enough, I decided that this event would be a great opportunity to promote sweets by sillianah - not only with business cards, but something people could take home with them as a favor. The treat had to be something I could make earlier in the week and not take up precious baking time the few days before the recital. After much deliberation and research, I decided on Oreo pops, or as I like to call them - cookies & cream truffle pops!

Of course, they ended up being time consuming and when I was all done packaging them and tying ribbons with promo tags on them... I forgot to take photos of the final product! sigh. Even so, they were pretty fun to make and actually kind of therapeutic!

It seems that when I'm organized and on schedule, baking is always therapeutic. But, when I'm in a rush or nothing is coming out right, then... not so much.

Overall, sweets by sillianah's "debut" event was a success - especially since there was barely a crumb left on the plates! There were maybe a handful of sugar cookies left, and that was it. I was shocked at how fast the plates emptied... it was like these people had never seen a morsel of sweetness in their lives! It probably helped that there were close to 100 people that showed up rather than the estimated 80. In hindsight, we probably should not have provided dessert plates as everything could be picked up by hand...guests piled their plates with 5-6 different sweets when I had anticipated each person having 2-3 sweets.

It's always a joy for me to see people's faces light up when they take a bite of one of my treats! Thanks to Fish, for letting me a part of this special event; my mom for providing the lovely fruit platter and going grocery shopping with me; the church aunties for helping to clean up; and my sweet hubby for his patience, putting up with my very particular transport and set-up "specifications"!

For a few more photos of the event, please visit the sweets by sillianah Facebook page.