5th Birthday - The Gruffalo!

This was a HARD cake. The head fell off while I was icing it - thank goodness I caught it and minimal damage was done to the cake (although my nerves were a different story!)

His head is made out of rice krispie square, but I still had a fair bit to learn about building cakes vertically! However, he stayed intact for the birthday girl, and she was over the moon. :) 

I had a LOT of fun with the food.

These are the goodie bags:

 

 

Owl Ice Cream (chocolate ice cream sweets)

 

 

Poisonous Warts were handpicked blue, green and yellow mini smarties. Mouse droppings were raisins covered in chocolate, and I didn't want scrambled snake as they had that for the party food so I just wrote "And away snake slid..." for the gummy worms. Although there wasn't a huge amount in the goodie bags, the kids loved the theme!

 

 

 Instead of a traditional piñata I made a pull string one, which I had never done before. I found instructions on Pinterest somewhere, but it's actually incredibly simple to make and doesn't involve any paper machè!

 

But the party food... ahh the party food was my favourite bit!

 

 Chocolate rice krispie treats became Knobbly Knees.

Pizza - Roasted fox!

Mini sausages became Gruffalo Toes

 

 

We had grapes that were Poisonous Warts

Quavers were Terrible Tusks

Oranges with eyeballs drawn on the peel, for Orange Eyes

Cheese Cubes became Terrible Teeth

I made some ladybird crackers too for my little ladybird girl, and rolled up wraps with ham in them and toothpicked to a piece of cheesestring became snails - still on the forest theme!

 

We had some jelly with gummy worms for Scrambled Snake

And the favourite was Gruffalo Crumble - a mix of chocolate breakfast cereals and other chocolate goodies, and broken up biscuits!

 

 

The little birthday girl! <3

8th Birthday - Marvel Superheroes!

This was my first true themed party. I had done the themes before but this one I really, REALLY went all out. We had a superhero themed scavenger hunt as soon as everyone had arrived, did a superhero themed obstacle course, and I got an Iron Man themed Velcro dart board thing which the boys had to shoot nerf bullets at, instead of a pin the tail on the donkey type game...

 

We played "throw the parcel" instead of pass the parcel because big boys of 8 are apparently too grown up for pass the parcel. My husband managed to get a bunch of comic book posters for free so we used them as a gift in each layer of the parcel, with an extra thing in the last layer of course. The boys were delighted with them!

 

 

 

These were the goodie bags - I ordered cups (from the US - not a cheap way to go about it once you add in postage to the UK!) and put a couple of bits in the bottom, bought cupcake pods and made these cupcakes to put in the top - they were a huge hit!

 

 

 

 

The piñata of course had to be Loki. Couldn't very well beat up Captain America or Iron Man, so went for a baddie. And we made a Thor's Hammer for hitting it with for added fun!

 

 

And my masterpiece.... by FAR the most complicated cake I had every attempted. I got the figures from eBay - they're imaginext ones I think. The towers are made of rice krispie cakes but still they were a huge gamble and it DID start to collapse ever so slightly while at the hall during the party! I had to do a last minute repair, and you will notice my hand in the second photo, holding it just in case it fell again haha!

 

He absolutely loved it, though - worth every drop of sweat!

4th Birthday - Ben & Holly's Castle

This was my first major cake sculpture. An experienced cake-making friend said to use rice krispie square mix to make the wall, so I took her advice:

 

 

I wanted a rainbow cake for the castle. I now know that I would have been better to make the castle with intermittent cake boards and supports but I was lucky this time and it didn't collapse!

 

I ordered the Ben & Holly's Little Kingdom castle and stole the figures out of it. I kept that present back from her until after her party, so she didn't notice the missing people!

 

There were actual squeals of joy and delight from the children when we cut the cake open to reveal the rainbow layers - worth every minute of the crazy-late night!

 

And after her party was finished we let her open her last present and play with the little figures from the cake!