Brunch & Co: Brunch & Co Event #13 - Magdaline's Birthday Brunch

It turns out that having a Hubby in the construction industry can be especially handy when planning an "architecture" inspired brunch as we did to celebrate Architect Magdaline's birthday today.
From coming up with the name card idea designed like mini building project signboards to helping search for drawings of the SwissRe headquarter building in London - otherwise known as "The Gherkin" - I especially couldn't have done today's brunch without him!

For starters, we "constructed" an antipasto platter of homemade goodies including ricotta (interesting - will try it with organic milk next time), Jambon Persillé (ham & parsley) terrine (inspired by a recent trip to Daniel Boulud's restaurant to celebrate our friend Rachel's upcoming wedding - Chef Boulud has collaborated with a famous third generation master charcutier, named Gilles Verot, for one of his restaurants in New York....Google is an amazing thing... whilst reading about terrines I stumbled across this recipe from the master charcutier himself so had to give it a go http://www.nytimes.com/recipes/8217/Jambon-Persill233.html). I also made tea cups filled with chicken liver paté and served these tasty treats with proscuitto, organic cherry tomatoes drizzled with olive oil, salt and pepper, slices of crusty bread and some big gherkins of course!

For our main course, we served up lamb shank pies inspired by the current tallest building in the world - the Burj Khalifa standing at 828m.... ok so our lamb shank pies only stood about 20cm tall but I reckon they looked pretty cool! We served this with sweet potato mash and minted peas.

After a short tummy stretch we served up a double sorbet of green apple & raspberry - it was really pretty (and yummy)!!!

Finally, for the Birthday Girl, we served up a chocolate hazelnut meringue cake with an espresso mascarpone frosting. Totally decadent and chocolatey as Magdaline LOVES chocolate.