Here were a few highlights:
Triple layer chocolate cake from CostCo (birthday boy's pick, because it's amazing), topped with beer bottle cap happy 30th bday sign crafted by moi:
Besides chocolate cake, I made Chocolate Oatmeal bars and we had Beer Mug Sugar cookies individually wrapped up so that people could eat then or take as a parting souvenir.
These super cute, and amazingly good cookies were made by Kelsey at Sweet Cakes. Clickity click on over to her blog to see the many other cookie creations she's done and if you are in the Kansas City area - hit her up. She takes custom orders and you won't be let down!
Besides the desserts, we had a Soft Pretzel Bar:
I got frozen soft pretzels (you can find in any grocery freezer isle near the frozen breads and rolls) and the provided several different dipping options to try:
Pale Ale Mustard (a local brewery's beer mustard), Stone Ground Mustard, cheese (the kind you find near the chips for dipping or nachos), melted chocolate and then created my own cinnamon sugar sauce, that I really liked.
Cinnamon Sauce: 1 single serving of vanilla Greek yogurt mixed with 1 TBS of cinnamon, 1 TBS of sugar or Splenda, 1 TBS of brown sugar (or you can do each to taste).
I got my pretzel, tore it up and tried all the dips (except cheese):
The Scotch bar was a hit (among the boys...the girls stuck to the wine area):
And then there was a ton of beer - all kinds of cool beer, home-brewed beers, local, micro, etc:
(This photo was taken before most of the guests arrived. This was just 1/8th of the visible beer. We also had beer in the "beer" fridge you see and our regular fridge.)
We had macro/cheaper beers downstairs in a cooler for the beer drinking games.
Overall, I think we made my hubs start to his thirties pretty fun. :)