Easiest birthday cake ever

K turned 11 recently and decided he was too old for a birthday party - what he really wanted was to have six friends over to stay the night, watch a movie and eat pizza and ice cream. His dad said no but I said yes, because I could see how excited he was and because I wanted him to have the best birthday ever. So - long story short, they came, they ate. they fought with nerf guns, they stayed awake til after 4am. And they made noise. LOTS of noise. It was heaven for the boys and hell for the rest of us, and I'm glad they had such a good time because it won't be repeated EVER again.

While the sleepover was the stuff of nightmares, K's cake was a dream to put together. I made a simple chocolate cake, coated it with buttercream icing and covered it with smoothly-rolled white fondant. I left to harden for a night before putting it out to be decorated with food markers by K's friends.

I kicked off the decorating with a simple 'happy birthday' message on the blank cake and was impressed by how well the markers worked, with clear lines and colour just as intense as regular markers. Having read reviews of various brands, I'd bought Americolor markers rather than the far less expensive Wiltons ones, and I'm so glad I did. Americolor isn't easy to find here in Australia, but luckily I located some at this amazing shop.

Besides looking rather cool, the cake tasted pretty good, if I do say so myself! R has now decided she wants one of these for her next birthday instead of the usual smash cake and I'm all for it. In the meantime, I wonder what other foods I can write on..?

What I made over the school holidays

In general: Treasure hunts.  Trips to the park. Rainbow loom bracelets. Kid crafts. Snacks, snacks and more snacks.

For R's birthday party: chalkboard oilcloth bunting (there is a good tutorial here but I made mine a little differently); the kids' favourite smash cake (a.k.a. pinata cake); snacks, snacks and more snacks. R's party was fairytale-themed (I bargained it down from 'fairy princesses') and she was adamant that she simply had to wear a Rapunzel wig. She also insisted on an official Disney-issue costume, and I must confess to being just a tiny bit pleased about not having to make it, despite my dislike of all things synthetic and Disney-produced - with the exception of the wig, which is spectacular.

 

After the big bash came Passover, then Easter, with a heap of eating but not much time for sewing and blogging. Besides, I had foolishly given my son my old computer before receiving my new one, which of course was delayed, then plagued with software issues, including the unpleasant discovery that my iphoto contained - inexplicably - pornography and other random images. There's been a lot of deleting going on around here!

I have been sewing a couple of things but they have proceeded at a snail's pace, with a seam sewn here and a ruffle gathered there. More soon, I promise!

A rainbow birthday party

The past week has been a bit crazy around here, with preparations for R's rainbow-themed 5th birthday party taking up most of my time. Once I did the calculations and worked out that we had invited 19 children, 6 grandparents, 5 other adult relatives plus the many mums and dads who would most likely stay for the party, I had a total freakout about the catering and started frantically preparing any adult food I could think of that could be made well in advance and frozen or stored (for the record, I made these potato latkes, some sweet potato patties from an Ottolenghi cookbook and a huge container of Proud Italian Cook's pita bread crisps, plus - on the day - her cannellini bean dip - incredibly delicious).

K and R helped make lolly necklaces, which are sweets wrapped in a cellophane roll and tied between each sweet with tiny bits of ribbon. Use a length of string to tie up each end and make the whole thing into a necklace and you have a very pretty lolly-bag substitute that your guests can wear home. We did the same thing last year... I guess now it's a tradition.

Filling the pinata was a much-anticipated event. They insisted on sorting all the sweets first. Kind of a shame to have to destroy something so beautiful...

And of course R had to have a rainbow skirt, which I foolishly decided to sew myself. It took about an hour just to find six colours of the star fabric, as they were cunningly hidden in different places around Spotlight. I was initially going for spots, but after digging out red, yellow, blue, green and purple I discovered they didn't have orange. Turns out it also takes rather a long time to hem, gather, pin and sew six ruffled layers - my estimate of how long the skirt would take me was wildly optimistic. And once the thing was done it reminded me disturbingly of something a clown might wear, but hey, it was for a rainbow party after all. Now if you're thinking there are seven colours in the rainbow, you are correct - I just decided for practical reasons to condense blue/indigo into one colour.

I couldn't pass up an opportunity to make my beloved Mexican tissue paper flowers again, despite the feeling that my preparations for the party were getting a little excessive:

In the spirit of rainbows the children ate fairy bread, ice-cream cupcakes with sprinkles (directions here) and rainbow fruit skewers before playing pass-the-parcel (accompanied by K playing 'Smoke on the Water' on his guitar) and a home-made game with the very catchy title of 'pin the coin in the pot of gold at the end of the rainbow'. Then came the destruction of the aforementioned pinata and the consumption of excessive amounts of sugar.

Had enough of rainbows yet? I'm a bit over them myself at this stage, but let's continue anyway. Since I made K a pinata cake last year R hasn't stopped talking about wanting her own 'smash cake'. I made the shell with white chocolate this time, and decorated it with smarties and rainbow rocks. The cake and the shell are relatively simple to make, but the rainbow decorations were a late-night labour of love. Below left you can see what I put on top of the cake before the 'shell' went on:

And here you can see the cake just after it was whacked with a ceramic pestle by an overexcited five-year-old.

We got lucky with the weather and had a beautiful sunny Autumn day. And there's my baby's fifth birthday party done and dusted, until next year. If you read this far, give yourself a pat on the back!

Playgroup art & craft: Black paper painting

We have loads of black paper at playgroup, which seldom gets used. So now and then I like to mix up some whitish shades of paint and let the children paint on black for a change. The light colours on the dark paper provide a striking contrast, and some glitter adds a bit of sparkle.

On Monday we followed up our black paper painting with some cupcakes to celebrate R's 5th birthday:

I like to use this recipe, which makes delicious, light cupcakes that cook very quickly. Had to make a second batch the next day for a kindergarten birthday celebration - and R's party will be this weekend. Lots of baking going on around here!

Portraits

I agonised over what to get my stepfather for his 70th birthday. He's a very unmaterialistic person who neither wants nor needs much, apart from his books, but we wanted to give him something special. My husband came up with the idea of commissioning a pair of portraits from two local artists (a.k.a. our children). So I put them to work with a photograph of the birthday boy in front of them and asked them to look at his face, then draw him in whatever way they chose.

R went for the full-length portrait, dressed him in blue and yellow striped pants and depicted him holding presents in each hand:

K worked more directly from the photograph, adding wrinkles and colouring the skin pink ('because that's the closest to skin colour we have' - clearly I need to buy these children some skin-toned markers!):

The frame I got for them had spaces for three photos so we added a central picture with '70' outlined in large letters. Each child filled in a letter with patterns and K wrote a birthday message at the bottom.

I was so pleased with the end product that I'm sure we'll be doing this again for some special person. Brace yourselves, family members - you too may soon be immortalised in a pair of portraits!

pinata birthday cake

So here I am, already posting about something that is neither art, sewing nor craft. Party food is very dear to my heart. Especially when it doesn't contain sausages or mincemeat. Every year I devote weeks of research to The Cake, which - so far - has been different every time. But I think I've finally found one that will be repeated again and again because it is (a) filled with sweets, and (b) unbelievably easy once you know how to do it. 

Presenting... the pinata cake (source: Women's Weekly Kids' Birthday Cakes Cookbook).

It's a round, iced cake covered with sweets, with a chocolate shell placed on top and decorated with more sweets. I followed the instructions in the book and used a large metal mixing bowl to mold the chocolate shell. After half an hour in the freezer it popped out easily. There's also a tutorial here that gives much the same advice. At K's birthday a couple of weeks ago I gave him a pestle to smash the shell with (couldn't get my hands on a toy hammer, as suggested in the cookbook) and when he did, this is what was inside: 

It was a huge success and Miss R has requested the same for her next birthday. How quickly she has forgotten her own cake, the construction of which just about killed me:

If I were to make the Rapunzel cake again I would NOT use a dolly varden pan (the one I used was lucky to survive. It only avoided being melted down and spat on because it had been loaned to me by a friend). Next time - if there is one - I will use round cakes of different sizes stacked on top of each other and carved into shape. Which will no doubt drive me equally crazy. But however overcooked or crumbly the cake, cover it all with fondant and it will look perfectly fine!