Garden of the Good Shepherd - Week Five

We had our fifth party for the Garden of the Good Shepherd last weekend! We have been having lots of fun turning one of our weekend meals into a party that celebrates the Easter season. Each of the foods served is associated with one of the symbols from that week on the calendar. This week, the theme was "The Gardener Plants Paradise."

The first photo above shows the foods for the olive tree and palm tree: olive oil Triscuits and a cheese ball with palm tree picks in it.

For the flowers, we had sandwiches cut into a flower shape using a cookie cutter. Then I also used a mini leaf cookie cutter to cut sliced cheese into shapes to represent the leaves of the tree of life.

For the fruit of the tree of life, we simply had fruit salad with grapes, bananas, and pears. Here is Cecilia with her plate...

...and Caroline with hers.

For our dessert, I made these marbled chocolate muffins...

...and frosted them with chocolate frosting. I actually had a little frosting leftover in the freezer and used it - and it worked fine! I'd never frozen frosting before, but I figured I'd try it since I didn't want to waste what I had left over. It was just a basic chocolate cream cheese frosting recipe. I had only made a half batch of muffins, so we had a perfect amount of frosting for them.

The girls assembled the cupcakes to represent the owl symbol from this week. We just used regular M & M's for the eyes rather than Junior Mints or peanut butter M & M's, which look better because they are larger, but I didn't want to have a bunch of leftover candy in the house since I have already gained 22 pounds and still have 15 weeks to go in this pregnancy - eek! The beaks are sideways yellow M & M's. I think they look cute with lopsided eyes, since the girls assembled them!

I got them to stand by the Garden of the Good Shepherd calendar with their owl cupcakes before they ate them.

Cecilia went straight for the eyes first!!

Check out the other Garden Parties over at Catholic Cuisine! So many cute adaptations this time, including owl cake and flowers made from ham and cheese!