Pinteresting a Welcome Barbecue

Pin It It's been quite a while since I last blogged.  I don't know what happened to the past three weeks! Anyway, last week was definitely a hectic one as one of my best friends from the Philippines came over for a visit.  Naturally, because it is her first time in the US, she had to be taken on a whirlwind tour of NYC.  I'll save the tips on how we did it way under her budget for another post.

Ever since I got hooked on Pinterest, I had sworn that I would try to do as much of the pins as I can.  I found the perfect opportunity to do so when we had an intimate barbecue to welcome my friend to NY.  While I decided to keep it simple by having a salad, burgers and hotdogs for the main "entree", I (with a lot of help from our guest!) put a little more effort on the appetizers and dessert.

For starters, we had tuna ceviche (recipe in the next post), chips with mango salsa (recipe here), and my Pinterest-inspired mini tacos.  I topped off the mini tacos with mango salsa and they were incredibly easy to assemble and looked impressive on the table.  We made the taco-seasoned ground turkey and mango salsa a day before so we only needed to assemble it before the party.

Finally for dessert, we made what would be my third attempt at banana pudding pie, coconut cupcakes a la Ina Garten frosted via Pinterest instructions, and another Pinterest-inspired dessert of red velvet brownies.

The photo sucks... and so does my frosting skills.  But I imagine with practice and a little bit more generosity with the frosting, my cupcakes will be much prettier in time.

 I followed the red velvet brownie recipe to the letter, except I took them out of the oven about 5 minutes earlier because of the much warmer weather.  They were just fine.  Also, the recipe calls for a white chocolate frosting, which I'm not a big fan of because I find it way too sweet.  So I decided to use Ina Garten's cream cheese frosting, along with some changes as I wrote here.  I also used 1/3 less fat Philadelphia neufchatel cream cheese with no noticeable change in flavor.

All desserts, except for the banana pudding pie, were done ahead of the party so there really wasn't much to do on the day itself.  And most importantly, everybody seemed to enjoy our little gathering and we had an awesome time reminiscing about high school.