Secret Garden: Mary, Mary Quite Contrary, How Does Your Garden Grow?

The movie was one that I watched a few times growing up and I am not sure why. The acting isn’t the best (except for Maggie Smith) but I think because the idea of having a secret garden always sounded amusing. I will say the garden that they grow is very beautiful and sometimes makes me wish we lived in England to have that sort of thing, instead of cactus and succulents found in AZ. So we rented the original movie on Prime and then got the new version on Redbox and watched both over the Friday/Saturday evenings. The girls didn’t even finish the new version (2020) and liked the original better. I think because there was a hurt dog in the new version and Kyrie couldn’t get past that. They ended up swimming in the pool instead. Oh well- they can’t like them all!

The theme for this movie was fun to do, but not easy! We tried to think of as many ways to incorporate fresh garden veggies/fruit and flowers to the theme. It was definitely easier with the fruit/vegetables than the flowers. So for an appetizer, we started with an artichoke. We all enjoy artichokes and the ones we got for this theme were huge. We just boiled them and dipped the leaves in either mustard or Mayo. The girls do neither, but eat it plain and look forward to the artichoke heart mainly.

We really wanted to mimic one of the trendy restaurants here and particularly their bruschetta boards. I wanted to have varieties, but knowing the girls wouldn’t eat them, we settled on pesto with Salami. Since pesto is made with basil and is grown in a garden- I thought it would work for a garden theme!! We did pick up the fresh bread from our local farmer’s market that morning as well. The girls ate it up, so it was a win just for that. I do think having more options would have been better- maybe when their palette grows just a bit more. We also just did a simple mixed green salad to complete the dinner.

The drink was fun and we were able to incorporate more flowers into it. We still had some elderflower (which has become a favorite of mine since a previous theme dinner) and added some hibiscus tea and Prosecco, we had our own floral arrangement. I love the combination and the bubbles from the Prosecco! The girls had only the hibiscus tea, which they seemed to enjoy.

So my plan the week before (which was Easter weekend) was to make a carrot cake. I never did end up baking it with doing the theme and cooking Easter dinner, but I still had all the ingredients. So we came up with the plan to make mini flower carrot cakes with cream cheese frosting. I found these silicon molds on Amazon-52 to be exact and basically made a carrot cake, but baked them in the molds. The mini flower cakes turned out ok to me, (I think because I accidentally omitted cinnamon) but they did not look like flowers, the girls still loved them! I will say the girls have complained about cream cheese frosting before and didn’t prefer it, but I was shocked they couldn’t get enough of it this time. I will have to incorporate that more into future bakes!

Overall the theme dinner turned out good, but the movie choice not so much. Comment below if you have watched both Secret Garden movies and tell me which one you prefer!

Disclaimer

These are my opinions, and not necessarily the same opinions of any organization I am affiliated with. Because I’m always adding new content to my blog, I may change my mind about a few older topics. I am not responsible for the comments my readers leave and I have the right to delete comments. The content on my blog is generated for entertainment and informative purposes, but not to be perceived as professional advice. Lastly, I am not offering any endorsements.