Senior Recital Reception

My oldest just graduated from college with a major in music and a minor in Bible! As a requirement for her music degree, she performed her senior recital–the BIG one–a week before graduation and did a superb job! I love listening to her play piano and will always enjoy her playing for us when she comes to visit.

For the senior recital, it’s customary for the student’s family to offer a reception after the performance. We’ve known throughout my daughter’s four years as a music major that this was coming and we would mention ideas for food or tables here and there, but we didn’t expect that she’d be engaged and planning a wedding during her last semester. It’s a busy time! However, I still wanted her reception to be just as special and well thought out as if nothing else was going on right now. She worked so hard on her recital and deserved a nice reception. And it paid off in more ways than one. The reception actually gave us a nice opportunity to test some ideas for her upcoming wedding reception….on a much smaller scale, of course!

The clear plates with the gold rim are ones we’re using for her wedding reception. For the flowers arrangements I found hydrangea blossoms and white roses at Winn Dixie and added clippings from my yard–shrubs, ferns, ivy–as fillers. I wrapped tall, straight glass vases with a copy of some of her recital sheet music and added a sage ribbon–one of her favorite colors lately! I found a collage frame at Walmart to display photos of recitals with different music teachers throughout the years (The very first music teacher she had in early elementary ended up being one of her music teachers again in college!). I ordered some tablecloths, but they ended up not delivering in time, so my mom came to the rescue with a couple of her white damask cloth ones and even came early to help me set up!!

It was recommended that we offer something salty, something sweet, and something to drink. We decided on charcuterie cups for the salty, macarons and chocolates for the sweet, and water and coffee for the beverages.

I mentioned last week that my sister and I had been working together on wedding ideas and one of those ideas was charcuterie cups. These were a hit at the piano reception! They were fun to make, pretty in their presentation, and easy for guests to grab and go. I’ll come back to these in just a minute.

I used one of my Olive & Cocoa crates, turned upside down, to raise some of the cups and give the table some interest. I covered the O&C logo with more printed sheet music from my daughter’s performed pieces.

The macarons came from Whole Foods and were so good! Sadly, our Whole Foods closed less than a week after the recital so I’m so glad we were able to get these before they closed.

I picked up an assortment of decadent chocolates from Costco which we will do again for the wedding. See the coffee dispensers below? We put out three but the third one was being filled when I snapped this photo. These dispensers are amazing! One night this past spring, during one of our wedding brainstorming sessions while I was staying at my sister’s, we decided to go in together on six of these! They were on sale at Sam’s Club for $20 each. We each purchased three and agreed to share them for the weddings and all future events. You just prepare the hot coffee or tea ahead of time and then pour into the dispensers and they’ll keep the beverage piping hot for hours! For my daughter’s wedding, they’ll be used for hot tea.

The whitewashed platforms came from Hobby Lobby when they were half off. I love them! I was concerned about using the clear plastic coffee cups, not knowing if they’d really be okay for hot coffee, but they had good reviews on Amazon, and I knew this would be a good time to test them before the wedding. They were great, so I ordered more for the wedding.

I forgot to take a picture of the water table, but all I did was purchase small water bottles, take off the plastic labels and add a strip of music scrapbook paper with double-stick tape. We had a table off to the side with the water bottles along with another framed photo of our pianist.

Okay, so now back to those charcuterie cups! I used two kinds of meat, two kinds of cheese, two kinds of crackers, some fruit, and olives. My sister and I had been playing around with arrangements and texting photos to each other to figure out an arrangement that would hold everything nicely without toppling over. Here’s what we ended up with: I used a 7-ounce clear square cup and started with grapes in the bottom, then stuck a stick of cubed cheeses in the back, a pick of salami and pepperoni in the front, and a strawberry on the side. The pretzels worked best stuck in the back with the tall stick of cheese cubes, and the grainy square cracker tucked nicely in the front. I also ended up having enough rosemary in my yard to put a sprig in each cup which you’ll see in another photo.

Once I figured out what I was doing, I lined up all the cups on my island and got to work! It helped that I’d already prepared the meat picks and cheese skewers ahead of time. I had to leave the crackers out so they wouldn’t get soft in the fridge. They would be added as we were putting the cups out on the table at the reception before the recital.

I used cake boxes to store them in and this is what they looked like all tucked in and ready to go in the fridge. I didn’t have enough boxes, so I used a couple of my aluminum pans and wrapped them well with plastic wrap.

We enjoyed the charcuterie cups so much! We didn’t know how many people to prepare for, so I went ahead and made a lot. We had plenty to send home with my daughter’s friends and brought some home for ourselves. They made for good weekend snacking! We are definitely repeating these for the wedding but in larger cups to hold more meat and cheese (per my husband’s request 😉), and I will have someone helping put the cups together.

It was a memorable evening with beautifully performed pieces (see program above). Such a special last recital for this girl who has devoted so much of her life to learning and enjoying music! Her last piece was one she arranged herself from the Anne of Green Gables theme. This one really got me, being that it was her last recital ever of her growing up years and that my girls were raised on Anne of Green Gables. It brought back a flood of memories of us reading the books and watching the movies. It was like the sweetest summary of her childhood: piano and Anne! We are so proud of our girl!