The weather is warming up, and what better way to celebrate than to have an outdoor champagne brunch! It was a wonderful way to enjoy the sunshine and do some cooking and drinking with these lovely ladies.

Of course, no champagne brunch is complete without… champagne! We had plenty flowing, with options to drink it straight or mix it with a variety of juices. A fantastic way to start things off while we cooked.

We had this gorgeous mix of raspberries, blackberries, and blueberries. Good for snacking, as well as mixing into our champagne!

While these croissants were not homemade, it was great to have them to snack on while we waited for the rest of the brunch to be ready. Ok, I’ll admit I might have been the only one who couldn’t wait for us to sit down for the meal. But I ate one then too 🙂

We cooked up some grits.

We made egg muffin cups with spinach, tomato, and bacon. Fun to eat, and the leftovers made great little breakfast-on-the-go packages.

We had some leftover egg mixture which we put into one large ramekin. It rose so beautifully in the oven!

While the baking was happening, we busted out not one, but two air fryers. I was pretty excited about this, as I’d never used an air fryer before. I love fried food, so was very curious to see if the air fryer did indeed give that great fried texture without all the oil.

First we air-fried chicken nuggets. I can’t even remember the last time I had chicken nuggets, so I was pretty happy to be munching on this nostalgic treat. So fun to dip, and they did come out nice and crisp.

We also did two kinds of sweet potato fries in the air fryer – regular and waffle-cut. They came out pretty good as well, especially considering how sweet potato fries can tend to be soggier than regular fries.

To balance things out, we had a lovely green salad with an avocado dressing made from homegrown avocados… yum!

And because I like to have dessert after every meal… double chocolate cookies to finish things off.