This past weekend I collaborated with friend and fellow food blogger Brianna of seasoningbottle.com. Briana & I attended the University of Florida together and have kept in touch ever since. Briana recently moved from Atlanta to NYC to get her masters in food studies at NYU. We’ve talked for a while now about doing a collaboration together and there was no time better than now. The air is getting cooler and New Yorkers love nothing more than a good get together at an apartment so I figured why not host a Fall Brunch at my apartment for some of our closest friends.
The event was a huge success, so I wanted to share with you the 5 steps you can take to throw the most epic fall brunch yourself! It took us about a week to get this together, so if we can do it, you can do it too!
Step 1: Develop a thorough menu
Briana is a excellent recipe writer and menu developer. Once I gave her the vision of what I saw our brunch being she came up with a plethora of ideas for our menu. I knew I wanted the food to be centered around fall but not over kill at the same time. Briana came up with a list of items, and I then consolidated the list into a spread sheet with the menu items on the left and the ingredients we would need for each item on the right. We ended up with a concise, clear menu that clearly depicted fall. It’s important to not overwhelm your guests with too many options that don’t fall within your theme, you want everything to come together and make sense in the end and the menu is the center of that.
Step 2: Go food and prop shopping early
Now, we could’ve followed this rule a little better ourselves but we still got everything done on time. Preferably if you have the time to spare, I would recommend going food shopping a couple of days before the event. However, based on timing we were only able to get together the night before. This wasn’t awful but it put the pressure on us to find all the items we needed that night. With the exception of the apple cider we were pretty much able to get everything on our list the night before *praise dance*.
Step 3: Start set up and cooking early
I woke up around 7:30am on Saturday to get my day started and give myself ample time to set up, clean and begin cooking. Once Briana arrived at my apartment we got started on the cooking immediately! One tip that I loved from Briana was writing down all our dishes on a notepad and crossing them out as we went along. That really gave us a good gauge of where we were with time and finishing everything up. Our brunch was slated to start at noon, but we ended up serving around 1pm, which was perfect because by that time everyone had arrived.
Step 4: Have enough food
This is the golden rule of any brunch party! You don’t want to skim on preparing enough food for your guests. In the beginning of the event guests will sometimes be modest but after a few delicious apple cider mimosa cocktails it’s going to be time to go back to seconds and that’s always a treat to have more left overs.
And that brings me to the final step……………..
Step 5: Have a signature cocktail
Preparing a signature cocktail drink for your fall brunch is essential because you want to allow your guests to enjoy a beverage to allow for mingling. This also buys you, the host, a little extra time to get items out of the oven and make the perfect presentation. For our signature cocktail we served an apple cider mimosa. We sliced an array of fresh fresh apples and soaked them in seasonal apple cider and topped with a healthy portion of extra dry champagne. It was perfectly fall without being too much of an over kill.
Well, there you have it, guys! Five easy steps to get you on your way to planning an awesome fall brunch party your friends won’t forget!
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| Me & Briana of Seasoningbottle.com |
Thank you to everyone who attended our event, can’t wait to throw more in the future. Special thank you to my boyfriend for all his help with this, couldn’t have done it without you, babe! And most importantly, my right hand woman, thank you Briana for being an extraordinary partner!
Until next time…….
Happy fall!
xo
