Ph.D. Graduation Party

After 6 long years, Dr. Leaf finally graduated from Stanford University with his Ph.D.! He’s worked so hard — so many classes, tests, projects, and then paper deadlines, meetings, his defense and his thesis — I’m so proud of him!! It’s been a hard and long road (for both of us, really) but in the end, we’re blessed he had this opportunity and so excited for what’s to come!

Basically, since we got married 5 years ago, I’d been thinking and planning for this day — graduation party day! I really wanted to celebrate his awesome accomplishments with a fun party with all our friends & family.

Party planning can be stressful, but I knew some tips ahead of time and learned more through this event. Here’s a couple highlights:

Cheese Plate

If you know me at all, you know that I LOVE CHEESE PLATES and it’s kind of my art. I kind of wish I could do this for a career, so please contact me if you want to pay me to do this for your party!!

This cheese plate was meant to feed ~50 people, and I had a little bit of everything left. I overbought cheese, as I had budgeted 3 oz. per person (50×3 = 150 oz = ~9.3 lbs) and added a little extra just in case – 10 lbs total. I had about 2-3 lbs leftover, because we also had chips & dip, chicken wings, watermelon and cake!

I followed my tried & true cheese plate strategy (outlined here), and bought a mix of fresh, crunchy, salty, sweet, soft ingredients — and lots of crackers & bread.

It was a huge hit, and very tasty/yummy. Overall it cost me about $500 for all ingredients ($10/person), but I think I could have brought that down to $400 if I was trying to budget.

We did have lots of leftover cheese, but everything else was eaten up!

Decor

I bought most of the decor on Amazon! Originally I had picked a red & gold color palette — as Stanford’s actual mascot is “Cardinal Red” the color — but someone pointed out that it was very 49er’s-esque. I definitely wasn’t excited by that idea so we stuck with white, gold, and pops of red in key areas like the cake table.

We bought balloon letters to spell out “Finally!” and “Dr Leaf” at the nearest Party City. These are really great if you have a big area of open space you want to fill up and make festive (like the windows in the photo).

We bought a variety of decor items from Amazon such as these pennant banners, dot banners, gold & white fans, the gold door covers for behind the cake table, and these star confetti pieces for the tables.

CAKE

I basically took on way too much for this party! I also baked a big chocolate cake & 50 cupcakes. I bought cute cupcake baking cups at Home Goods for pretty cheap, and used these as my “pop of red” for the cake table.

This is my favorite chocolate cake recipe. And I sort of winged-it with the frosting. It was going to be 85 degrees and the party was outside, so I added shortening to the frosting. Shortening helps frosting stay stiff and can make it have a crunch layer on top, which doesn’t taste that great, but it keeps ingredients like butter from melting everywhere. I found this article extremely helpful and learned something new: Cream cheese frosting can really hold it’s shape in heat, contrary to my common sense assumption that it would melt.

I also used this AMAZING vanilla cupcake recipe. The texture and flavor was fantastic. And made up my own “Raspberry and Rose Frosting” recipe to go with it, where I also winged-it — adding a few spoonfuls of raspberry jam and 1 tsp of rose water to it.

I got the cake topper and the cute sparkly gold cupcake picks on Amazon as well.

I’m so very proud of my Ph.D. graduate husband!!! He’s the first “Dr.” in our family and has worked so hard for this moment. Congratulations to Dr. Leaf!