How to Host a Seaside Mother's Day Brunch ⋆ The Shore Blog

How to Host a Seaside Mother’s Day Brunch

Are you looking for something beach-inspired to do for Mother’s Day? If you can’t get down the shore, consider hosting a beach-themed Mother’s Day brunch so you can feel as if you’re dining by the sea.

First, select a venue where you can be creative with décor, table settings and activities. We hosted our brunch at our home well off the coast, so we not only had to be creative, but we had no limits on what we could do, either.

Next, create a menu that will allow you to play upon the seaside theme. You can either go with straight-up seafood items such as shrimp cocktail, lobster rolls, crab dip or other seafood items. If your guests aren’t seafood lovers, you can still create land-side foods using a beach theme.

For appetizers, we created palm tree fruit plates. These were made from bananas, sliced kiwi and clementine orange sections.

Giving a nod to the traditional Mother’s Day gift of flowers, we created our own tomato, cream cheese and scallion bouquets, tied together with a red licorice string.

And, of course, we served sweet tea in our backyard, using Target summertime glassware. We sat upon aqua Adirondack chairs (already owned) and used a bamboo serving tray from Crate and Barrel.

For the main menu, we created tuna salad sandwiches on croissants and made them into crabs. You can do this with other fillers as well, such as lobster salad, ham and cheese or even PB&J for the little ones. Simply slice a croissant and insert your fillers. The legs are made from red pepper slices, and we used toothpicks to affix black olive slices for the eyes and grape tomatos for the claws.

For another sandwich selection, we made flip-flop sandwiches. Again, use whatever sandwich filler you desire (we used ham and honey mustard). For the straps, we cut pieces from a red pepper and affixed an olive to the center with a toothpick.

We also made good use of our seaside serving dishes. Here, we served shell pasta salad on a starfish plate, and broccoli salad on a fish plate.

We carved a round watermelon into the shape of a beach bucket and filled it with fruit salad.

Desserts consisted of Sand Dollar cookies, which were made from sugar cookies and decorated with icing and sunflower seeds. Our seashell cupcakes featured peach colored icing and white chocolate seashell shapes. And we made clamshell cookies from Madelines decorated with icing and white chocolate balls for the pearl.

Finally, our guests made beach fairy gardens to remember our fun day together. We filled aqua-colored pots with sand and used faux succulent plants and fairy garden-sized beach chair, beach bucket and to make our little beaches.