Strawberry Party for Emmy

As much as I love truck parties, fish parties, airplane parties and the like, there is always going to be a special place in my heart for pretty girly themed parties. It's so satisfying to not have to worry if anything I'm making is too pretty or frilly.

Last weekend my sister mentioned that we would be having a bbq in the park for Emmy's third birthday, but that she was flat out at work and didn't have time to put together anything fancier than a sausage sizzle. You can work out what happened next... I promised not to go overboard or spend too much money and Jen gave me full licence to do whatever I wanted for Emmy's party. Love her!!

Once I decided on the strawberry theme it all came together really quickly.

We had the party down at the park yesterday and luckily I'd set everything up at home and snapped some photos first because it was crazy windy once we got down there! Plus it was super hot and the cake melted in the middle and started to collapse! It wasn't a drama though, we just ate cake first before we cooked the bbq. No-one has ever complained about getting to eat cake first!

  

Vintage Style Tea Party

It's no secret that I absolutely love all things girly and pretty. But with a house full of boys I rarely get the chance to embrace all things pink. So when my niece turned 8 earlier in the month I jumped at the chance to throw her a little afternoon tea.

I decided to go with a simple, pretty, vintage style afternoon tea and absolutely love how it turned out!

The other thing that I loved about this little party is that it was completely stress free. Normally when I throw a party (no matter how prepared I am) I end up yelling orders at my poor family members as we rush around getting last minute jobs done on the day of the party, before turning on my party face as the guests arrive. This time I did it all with an absolute minimum of fuss and it was a nice change!

To kick things off I made this sweet little invite for Ava. I just threw it together in picmonkey and then wrapped it in a doily and some bakers twine. Ava was so excited when she saw it for the first time!!

The main feature for the table was these tissue paper poms. I used pale pink, peach, cream and white and made them in various sizes, then used bluetac to stick them to the wall.

To complete the table I added an old birdcage that I spray painted white a few years back, a cloche with a sweet white ceramic bunny sitting on a pedestal (which was actually just an upside down egg cup and pretty pink and gold saucer), and some silver teaspoons with pretty bows tied on them.

The food elements I used were a two tier cake (gluten free and iced with fresh whipped cream), milk in vintage style milk bottles with pretty pink paper straws and fresh strawberries on a pink and gold cake plate.

To finish it all off I included chocolate bars wrapped in pink and silver paper and take home bags (brown paper bags topped with white doilies).

{How much do you love their tutus!! My very clever sister made them.}

Ava's face when she saw it all set up was priceless!! She was so excited to be the guest of honor :).

We had one little activity at the afternoon tea party - cupcake decorating, which the three kids absolutely loved. Ava showed elegant restraint when decorating her cupcake, while Max and Emmy went nuts with the sprinkles! I cheated on the cupcakes and made the worlds easiest cakes, I'll share the details on them later in the week. You will be amazed at how simple they were!

After they decorated (and ate) their cupcakes we sat down down with the grandparents for milk (and tea and coffee) and cake.

A sweet afternoon for a very sweet little lady :).

 
xx Tamsyn

Happy Birthday Sonic

This morning Max came running up to me and said 'mumma we forgot, we forgot that today is my birthday'. I told Max that it wasn't his birthday and he went on to say 'I'm not Max, I'm Sonic and today is my birthday'. How can you argue with that!? So I threw him a little impromptu party :)

 
Toddlers really are the cutest!

Fish Party - Party Bags

I'm back with another post from Max's Fish Party, this time I'm sharing the deets from his party bags. After all of the effort that I put into his cake these might be a bit of a let down though!

I kept it really simple & cheap for these, all up each bag only cost me about $3.50 (which is a record for me by a long shot!!).

I was originally planning on making 'goldfish in a bag soaps', but after looking at buying all the supplies for them I realised they were going to cost way more than I had budgeted for. I really liked the look of them though so I decided to style my bags in a similar way.

I started out with clear cello bags from the dollar store ($2 for 25). I wanted the base of them to be flat, so I snipped off the bottom of them and then used this tutorial (and some washi tape) to get the shape I wanted.

Next up I found an image I liked online and digitally coloured it using fireworks. Then I printed them and cut them out.

I popped a cardboard fishbowl into the front of each bag, filled them with a couple of ballons, a mini slinky, some stickers, a fish colouring in page, colouring pencils and some sweet little lollies (I used ones that were left over from decorating which helped keep the costs down further).

Simple and cheap, and the best part was that Max loved them so much and he got such a kick out of handing them out to his little friends :).

You can see the all the photos from Max's party here and a tutorial on how I made his cake here.


Edited - Here's a link to the fishbowl image - http://stuck-on-glue.blogspot.com.au/2011/02/cut-and-color-printable-fishbowl.html

Fishy Cake

Back when I shared the details of Max's birthday party I kind of promised I'd be back with details of the cake and decorations. Umm yeah, didn't quite happen sorry! Between having a baby, Christmas and my etsy shop things got a little crazy in December. But as promised here are the details of the cake :).

Before I tell you about the cake though, I want to share the invites I had made for the party. They were done for me by the very talented Julia at Kuku Couture Invitations. If you need invitations for any occasion you have to go check her out. She's an absolute dream to work with and makes the most gorgeous designs.

Now for the cake!

After pinning images like this and this I knew that I wanted to do scalloped icing, but with a more fishy feel to it. My plan was for it to look a bit like fish scales all over the cake.

I started off by making three dense chocolate mudcakes, then I layered them together with buttercream (the recipe I used is here) and crumb coated the whole lot. I'm by no means an expert at crumb coating (or cake making for that matter), to see how to do a good crumb coat you can check out this tutorial here.

Once the crumb coat had firmed up in the fridge for half an hour I started with the scalloped icing. Using the same buttercream I made up three different colours, blue, green and white, and then I half filled three seperate piping bags.

To get the scalloped fish-scale look I piped a series of icing dots vertically down the cake using number 12 round tips on my icing bags (I forgot to take a picture at the start, but you can see the dots in the picture below).

 

Once each vertical row of dots was done I would take the end of a teaspoon, push it into the middle of the icing dot and then drag it to the right. Then it was just a matter of repeating the entire way around the cake. I tried to keep my colour patterns nice and random for that fish scale look.

After the sides of the cake was finished I did the same thing around the top of the cake.

It was time consuming (it took me about 5 hours to ice all up!!), but definitely worth it, everyone loved it and it tasted delicious!

For the party I also made some fishing pole cupcakes (or rod-n-fish cakes as Max liked to call them!). They were super simple. I saw the idea on pinterest and went from there. I made vanilla cupcakes, piped a swirl of blue buttercream on top of each and then added a little fishing rod that I made out of bamboo skewers, twine and gummy fish. Super cute!

There you have it, Max's Fishy Cake... Better late than never right!?

(If you'd like to see more from Max's party you can see the party photos here and details of the party bags here.)

Max's Fish Party

On the weekend Max turned three and we celebrated with a Fish party. Max has been looking forward to his party for months, it was so good to finally be able to share it with him!

We had half a dozen of his little friends come over for the party and we celebrated with games, lunch, present opening and cake.

I decorated using streamers, a shell and starfish garland, coffee filter number three, and a burlap birthday banner. I'll put up a tutorial for the birthday banner and number three soon :).

For lunch we had chips, fish shaped crackers, sandwiches (a mix of vegemite, jam, chicken, ham and egg), fruit and vege sticks in dip. Max loved that the jam and vegemite sandwiches were cut in circles and has decided he wants all his sandwiches cut that way from now on!

For the games we played pass the parcel and went fishing in Max's paddling pools. The fishing game was heaps of fun and I'll post the details about that later too. Surprisingly pass the parcel was not so much of a success. We played it last year at Max's 2nd birthday and it went really well. This year there were a few tantrums over who's turn it was, whoops!

At least it was good practice for present opening time. All the kids chipped in and helped Max open his presents :).

Desert (always my favourite!) was a chocolate mudcake with 'fish scale' icing, fishing rod cupcakes, jelly, lollies, marshmallow pops and plain milk. The cake took me 5 hours to ice, but was totally worth it! I'll post more details about it soon.

Last up we had fishy party bags for the little ones to take home.

I feel like I can breath a sigh of relief that it's all finished now, I'm so happy that Max had such a great day :).