Celebrating Double Birthdays With Fresh Flours for a Private Dinner from FCS

Double the birthdays definitely ended in double the fun with this private dinner with Flour Child Stuff! Custom cakes with ice cream, sauces, and garnishes, a carved ice bottle chiller with wine pairings, a multi course dinner with a veggie fresh Modern Italian vibe, and scratch baked fresh breads with compound butters and jams were perfect for this special occasion.

A private dinner starts with the table settings, of course! Just the right plates, tall and elegant wine glasses, freshly polished silverware, crisply folded napkins, freshly printed menus, coordinating earthy stands and in this case custom decorated cakes and ice carvings are perfect for making the room have an atmosphere that matches the quality of the food.

This bottle chiller was super cool to make! Really, I can't help myself, the cold puns just flow effortlessly! ;) It started with a slab of ice that was cut with the CNC into four squares with a hole cut in the center to perfectly fit a bottle. Well, truly it starts with programming the CNC, but that's a story for another blog post.

After that, it's beveled with a hot plate and fused together. This is literally one of my favorite steps to any carving. A simple hot iron for just a few seconds on an ice carving can change it completely. Although it's a fairly simple process, there is definitely a trick to it! The result is a beautiful geometric bottle chiller, a perfect centerpiece that is also functional!

To start dinner off, a veggie gnocchi with a citrus butter sauce was served as an appetizer with lemon herbed chicken "coins," pickled oranges and fried shallots.

A springy salad was next on the menu, both adult and kids versions. Savory parmesan and thyme shortbread squares were the perfect garnish for this lemony spinach salad with spicy walnuts, rainbow carrots, and pickled apples.

As the main course, a red wine marinated New York Strip paired with a beefy macaroni and cheese and spicy rainbow carrots with a carrot top basil pesto.

Since there were double birthdays, there had to be double the cake! The first cake was zingy lemon with vanilla buttercream, decorated with a hand painted Todoroki fondant plaque and finished with red airbrush accents.

And of course, no birthday celebration is complete without a double chocolate cake. This one is a buttermilk chocolate cake, fudgy chocolate ganache, chocolate cookie butter buttercream, and piled with mini cupcakes, cookies, and chocolate. Honestly, I'm not sure what could be more delicious than that.

Of course, a special dinner like that was created by a team. After all, team work makes the dream work!

A big thank you to Nadeau's Ice Sculptures in Forest Park (https://www.nadeauice.com/) for facilitating the icy creations that go into these events.

Everything that is learned in the shop and every piece of ice that is created is truly an unforgettable experience not just for me as the ice carver but for every person that gets to enjoy them at the event.

Also, a big thank you to Corporate Business Cards in Franklin Park (www.corpbuscards.com) for doing all of the printing for the FCS brand. From labels and stickers, to business cards and thank you cards with matching envelopes, to custom menus for private events, it's been the component that has continued the Flour Child Stuff brand identity from the quality of the food I produce to the image of the company as a whole.

And because this Flour recognizes where she got her roots, a big thank you to all the Chefs at Joliet Junior College (https://jjc.edu/) for being an amazing school to learn the basic fundamentals of really good cooking that led to building these menus. Truly, the entire experience at that school changed my life.

Overall, a wonderful birthday celebration was had by all! There was delicious food, a comfortable atmosphere, a close family, icy and sweet decorations, and a birthday song to finish things off. Whether it's a special birthday, an anniversary, a holiday gathering or another special event in your family, fresh flours from FCS is the perfect way to celebrate (https://www.flourchildstuff.com/contact-us)!