Happy Birthday Matthew!

We are a little late posting this but here it is:

Wendy asked Matthew how he wanted to celebrate his birthday this year.  He decided he wanted to spend the time crabbing at his grandparent’s house in Maryland.  Of course we honored his request with the help of his wonderful grandparents!   Matthew was determined to catch enough crabs for all of us to eat and share for his birthday lunch. Although Matt had a blast crabbing, after hours of trying, he managed to only catch a few so unfortunately the crabs had to be ordered. 

For the first time we made this Chesapeake Crab Snack Mix (recipe below and HERE).  This was great and everyone liked it.  There are a variety of items that you could substitute or add within this recipe to adjust to your liking.  This celebration was only family but if you had guests you can make goodie bags with this snack mix to give to your guests to take home.

Matthew’s grandparents took the legal crabs that he caught and taught him the steaming process.  These crabs actually went home with him so he could eat them the next day!

Matthew’s Aunt Chris gave him a 3 layered cake as his birthday gift, which was so exciting for him as this was the PERFECT birthday cake for him this year!  Kristen envisioned the 3 layered cake as a crab basket filled with cake and crabs spilling from it.  We wanted to stay away from fondant, so we found rubber crabs at our local craft store along with the craft basket.  Of course when we tried putting the whole thing together the cake was to tall for the basket!  We made the best of it and placed it in the basket and propped the crabs up.  All in all it was an amazing cake!  Matthew was so excited to see his cake and he loved it!

Since this needed to be an outside party we used a part of the deck and decorated the best we could do.  Kristen collected fish nets and plastic crabs from the party store.  We also printed out a few crabs and seagulls and cut them out to hang in our fish nets.  The whole color scheme was created around the crab plates we found at the Christmas Tree Shop!   Kristen printed and cut out the Happy Birthday Matthew sign that we used as the back drop.

We used the computer and print to make the sign and placed in a fish net.  We also printed out paper crabs to add too :)

Place setting

The cake!!

Matt crabbing

The tablescape!

Silly boys!