Kelly's Corner: Tommy's Birthday-Pinterest style!

So I recently became obsessed with Pinterest. Yes I know I said I didn't quite get it before but about an hour later I was in Pin-heaven! I am a HUGE fan of cooking and baking and some of my first pins were for food items. This coincided beautifully with Tommy's birthday weekend. A great time to try out some new recipes! Actually all but one of the items made at Tommy's birthday was a new recipe and only one new recipe was NOT found on Pinterest-I bet it will be found there after this blog because it rocked and is pretty healthy too! Unfortunately everything else that I made wasn't. But isn't that what ~~weekends~~ birthdays are for?

Since October is a crazy month we had to have Tommy's birthday dinner the day before his actual birthday. It was a fun day and we did most of the prepping and cooking before hand so we didn't have to be stuck in the kitchen when the guests arrived. I say WE because Tommy helped. Yes I put him to work but in my defense it wasn't his actual birthday. Mainly he chopped the chicken and veggies for the kabobs and put them on the skewers. Not too bad but we were making enough to feed both of our immediate families so there was a lot of skewering going on. This is one of the recipes I didn't get from Pinterest but it was a new recipe-sort of. We normally do veggie kabobs which rock but at our family reunion the weekend before someone had made Teriyaki chicken kabobs and they were awesome. We decided to try them out!

They are very simple and oh so yummy! We use Lowry's Teriyaki 30 minute marinade and marinated the chicken, red peppers, and sweet onions a few hours before the guests arrived. We popped them on skewers and fired up the grill and voila! A perfect main course.

We used about 6.5 lbs of chicken to feed over 20 people. It was the perfect thing and since we don't have much seating in our house-they were easy to eat standing up! I wish I had a picture of the cooked kabobs but they went too fast!

I don't have any pictures of my side dishes but I did make one of my go to recipes from none other than the Barefoot Contessa! Parmesan Roasted Asparagus. So yummy. I also made (from Pinterest) Slow Baked Mac-n-Cheese. Super good! I am always nervous to try a new recipe when having guests over but I loved it. It was more pasta-y than sauce-y (if that even makes sense) than my normal recipe but it was so good.

Deserts are always a favorite thing of mine and all of the desserts I made came from Pinterest with the exception of Tommy's cake. My mom helped me out and made one of Tommy's favorites-a sour cream pecan pound cake. I found this recipe on the web that is pretty close to my moms but my mom doesn't do a glaze. I am planning on trying to make it soon so I will post my moms recipe then!

Tommy is a HUGE fan of Snickers. When I saw these on Pinterest I just HAD to re-pin and I knew immediately I would make them for Tommy's birthday-Home made Snickers-yum!. Overall they were pretty easy to make-just time consuming since you had to set each layer. They were rich and delicious and possibly next time I may try them without the butterscotch chips and just add more milk chocolate instead just to see if that helps tone down the sweetness. Tommy LOVED them and just finished up the last few the other night-the recipe makes a lot and you can only eat a little at a time so we had lots of leftovers. By the way this recipe is from the same blog as the Slow Cooked Mac n Cheese...needless to say I have a new food blog I follow. I made these the morning of the party so I didn't have time to take pictures as I was making them but I did manage to shoot a picture of some of the leftovers. So good I tell you!

Another Pinterest recipe that was a hit and again Tommy devoured any and all leftovers was for Pumpkin Spice Chocolate Chip cookies. The recipe called for mini chocolate chips but I love chocolate so I used Chunks instead. YUM! When I make them again (I am thinking Thanksgiving) I will probably double the recipe because this one made a relatively small batch but since I was already having a boatload of other desserts I figured I didn't need much more than it made so it was perfect.