Living In Domesticity: Fall Party!

On Saturday we entertained about 25 of Tim's work friends at our home for a traditional Kentucky style fall party. What does that entail you may ask? Well in our case, it included burgoo, bourbon, cornbread, red velvet cake, lots of beer, pumpkins and a bonfire, to name a little. I really wish I had better pictures of the event, because I really liked how it all turned out but my camera battery died just as guests were arriving so all I have are the pictures of the details, no guests. For those of you unfamiliar with burgoo, a traditional Kentucky dish, it basically is a stew that consists of many types of meat, preferably smoked before hand and lots of veggies and you have to cook it forever, Tim cooked ours for about 10 hours after the smoking of the meat. So basically he cooked for two days on this.

It's kind of spicy and usually served at large gatherings. A lot of churches and festivals serve it here in Kentucky. Ours included pork, beef, lamb and chicken, okra, carrots, corn, potatoes, onions, tomatoes, hot peppers and maybe a few other things. I'm happy to post a recipe if anyone wants to make this, warning though it serves about 40-50 people. The bourbon of course is another traditional Kentucky item as bourbon only comes from Kentucky. The cornbread and red velvet cake aren't strictly Kentucky fare, but definitely southern favorites.

For my red velvet cake I iced it with a traditional cream cheese frosting and then made some white chocolate ghosts on sticks to decorate. To do this just line a cookie sheet with parchment, lay your sucker sticks down on the parchment and using a squeeze bottle filled with melted white chocolate free hand a ghost shape. Make them fairly thick so they don't break when you lift them off the parchment. I used a toothpick dipped in black food coloring to make the eyes.

I also made Reese's cupcakes which are to die for, basically take a brownie mix, make it according to directions and tin each of 12 cupcake liners cover just the bottom of the liner with batter. Place an entire full sized peanut butter cup on top of that and then cover with more batter, filling up about 2/3's of the liner. Bake 10-15 minutes or until set. I iced mine with a peanut butter buttercream icing.
Peanut butter frosting
1 stick softened butter
3/4 c. shortening
1 c. peanut butter
4 c. powdered sugar
1 tsp vanilla
mix the shortening, butter and peanut butter until fluffy, add the vanilla and then the sugar. You can add some water a tsp at a time to thin it out if need be.

And the Paula Deen Pumpkin Trifle was really awesome too!

I'm also including some pictures of the house decorations. Later this week I have to get some of the outside, since Tim did a great job out there and it looks really cute.