Belated Holiday Party

Ann hosted a wonderful holiday party for the alums of my sorority who were in the NYC area. But since there were so many of us with different schedules, we ended up doing it towards the end of January. We had a white elephant exchange - but the rules were that we had to re-gift instead of buy gifts!

The night before the party, I went over to Ann's to help with some of the preparation. First of all, Trader Joe's in the city is crazy. The place is tiny and you can only push these mini carts around, and the line is unbelievably long. Before I got there, Ann said that they weren't allowing people into the store because it was so backed up. I don't know what I would do if I had to shop there every week for my groceries. While Ann prepared some of the appetizers for the next day, I was in charge of the dessert. I think I caused more trouble than I was helpful. First of all, the recipe for the dessert called for chocolate toffee, which we couldn't find. So Ann improvised and bought chocolate chips and Werther's candy which is like toffee?! But we needed to crush the Werther's so Ann said I can use a hammer. I failed miserably and so we decided to use a blender, which worked better. Then I was supposed to use melted butter, except I didn't melt it completely through, so I ended up having to use my arm strength to blend the butter in with the flour. What made it worse was that Ann didn't have an electric mixer, so I was using spoons, forks, spatulas to mix things. There were all these bubbles of flour, clumps of butter, cream cheese, I was really doubtful of how it would turn out. Anyway, the dessert took me like 2 hours to prepare. Although it ended up not being very pretty it was super sweet and delicious.

I can't remember what these things are called but they were SO good - it's made with potatoes, peppers, some spices, dipped in flour and fried I think























This is what it looked like trying to crush the Werther's candy. Would you believe we were baking dessert??!!


















Ann made everything from scratch. She is amazing. She's like a Chinese Martha Stewart.

















Two girls I met at the party - they were too young for me to have known them when I was in school .... sigh


















Gift exchange time!


















Tina got two books that were re-gifted, the person who brought them never read them, haha


















LOL. I laughed so hard when she opened this gift. Lisa's fiance got the Homer chia pet at their white elephant gift exchange over a month ago, and she re-gifted it! We joked about possibly seeing it again the following year, hahaha.