Say it with a Kiss – Hershey Kiss birthday cake
Hershey shaped cake with levels of Hershey kisses, with a bit Hershey kiss on top. What more could a girl ask for? Yay chocolate.
This one was for L’s birthday in ‘09 and you can see in the picture below there was lots of lovey dovey accents with heart plates, red/pink decorations, and even red kool-aid to match.
As per our usual tradition of not being allowed to see the cake until the moment the party is ready to light the candles and blow them out, here’s L waiting anxiously:
Does that not look anxious enough? How about this one then?
Yeah, excitement does funny things to one’s face, hehe.
Halloween Birthday Party – Glow in the dark food, devil eggs, monster slime, cereal pumpkins
We’ll cut right to the chase here:
How to make glow in the dark food
Tonic water! I have to give all the credit of this one to Our Best Bites. I’d never seen this before and loved the idea from the moment I saw it
I didn’t get any great photos out of my fun, but after hunting down a black light finally, it really transformed the entire room. Everything glowed. Especially in this small picture, you can’t see it very well, but not only did all the food I used tonic water in glow like crazy, but so did the card envelopes, part of the table cloth (white ghosts), lace runners, etc. There’s a difference in the light colors at the top because I had a single real “black light” with all the appropriate rays, and the others were colored black just to keep things spooky, hehe.
I took Our Best Bites’ recommendation and added some tonic water to my jello skulls. My photos have magically disappeared of these, but they had this kind of glow and in the shape of skulls:
(From OBB obviously)
~Edit~ Here’s one where you can see the skulls on the plate, but they’re upside down and not glowy. It’s not a good shot, but I realized I’m missing dozens of photos at this point, so this is the best I can produce right now. :( On the right hand side, you can sorta see the orange pumpkin jello through the blur, and the middle guy was what I had left of the white jello, so he became a ghost blob in the middle.
It only takes a little bit of tonic water to make them glow like crazy so I only had to replace about half of the water in the jello with tonic water. I also placed small margarita-style glasses around the table with a bit of tonic water in them for added effect.
Devil Eggs
No, not deviled eggs. They are, of course, but the point is that the eggs look like devils themselves, hehe. I posted about this once before, so it was nice to get to do it myself.
These were the hardest thing I had to deal with all day. If you look closely, you can see that the eggs aren’t exactly the smoothest, to say the least. They would not peel properly *at all* and I spent 45 minutes picking away shell carefully. Worst.Eggs.Ever. It was awful really and put me behind schedule because I had no idea I’d spend that long, just trying to get shell off. I’ve never had those kinds of issues before, even with eggs that gave me a bit of a struggle. Bleck.
(You can see the wacky tablecloth and bones, etc here too)
I varied the pepper shapes and where they were pointing, too. Oh, and to make them round instead of oval, just squish the eggs some before slicing. You can hold each one between your finger tips for several seconds, but I was under major time constraints, so I set them under a box lid that I filled with heavy books, hehe.
Monster Slime Eyeball Punch
This was made up as I went. I couldn’t find any advice on how to make eyeballs for a punch that didn’t just say “buy the candies” and all other sorts of eyeballs either couldn’t go in liquid without falling apart or wouldn’t have floated anyway.
So I combined a few ideas, added my own, and took a leap, hoping it’d work. Sure enough, it did!
The night before, I carefully stuffed 3 ice cube trays full of marshmallows, lifesaver candies, and raisins, to look like eyes.
I tried doing some where the pupil portion was facing down as well, but it didn’t make any difference in how they floated. Then I filled them carefully with water and froze them. This made it so I had ice to keep the slime cold, and it kept the candy marshmallow eyeballs connected (until they melted, of course). It also guaranteed they’d float.
The rest of the punch was just lime sherbert pulled apart slightly into swampy chunks, Sprite, and some tonic water to add a slight bit of glowiness.
Kix Pumpkins
I got the original idea from The Girl Who Ate Everything, but changed a few things around.
Here’s the original recipe:
1/2 cup light corn syrup
1/2 cup white sugar
1/2 cup creamy peanut butter
1/2 cup white chocolate chips
3 1/2 cups Reese’s Puffs cereal
The key difference I made was using Kix cereal instead. It’s still round, but doesn’t seem as “bad” to me. I used some regular corn syrup and sugar, but cut down the amounts a bit and added a little extra peanut butter instead. I also ended up using white candy coating bark instead of chips, too, because my store was out of white chocolate chips. The rest of the instructions you can find on TGWAE site.
Cake
And this one isn’t a “how-to” but definitely an important part of the party….the cake! Haunted house cake, at that, thanks to my mom’s decorating skills.
And in case you can’t see the trim around the bottom, she turned some of those into ghosts at the last minute as a final touch:
Halloween Birthday Party – The buildup, decorations, invitations, and everything else not related to food :P (Picture overload)
I have an October birthday and growing up, I always felt bad for other October babies who ended up with Halloween-themed parties. Fortunately, my parents always kept the seasons and holidays separated from birthdays, but I went to my fair share of kids’ parties who had orange and black cakes, ghost invitations, and Halloween candy treat bags.
But last year after the little one’s birthday party, she made an unusual request. Well, just having a request in general was unusual because we don’t take birthday theme/cake/party requests and they’re always surprises, but it was an even bigger shock to me that she commented she wanted a Halloween birthday party.
Really?
So knowing that 7 year olds make comments in passing all the time and then shortly forget, I held onto it. Fast forward 11 months later and I’d already been scheming things I wanted to do, and she was clueless. Couple this with my mom’s creativity as well and we were bound to rock this party.
This was for a little girl who is a huge girly girl one minute (she spends more time in the bathroom and in front of a mirror than all the other kids combined) and the next, she’s playing in the dirt and causing mischief. Mom didn’t want to do gorey stuff, so we went for a more traditional Halloween theme…..ghosts, witches, jack-o-lanterns, spiders, etc, but with a little bit of scariness and blood mixed in.
To kick things off, the invitations. Strangely, there were no Halloween invitations at any of the stores that really fit what we wanted, so we did what we do best, and improvised.
Yep, that’s a small orange paper plate. And yep, that’s what one of the invitations looked like. None of the other invitations looked exactly that way, though, and each one was unique. You can see the bigger version here and really inspect what my amazing mother drew.
Of course, they just look like silly jack-o-lanterns, but what turns them into a birthday invitation is that all the details are on the back. Each of those were written slightly different, too, but they had all the important info clearly laid out.
My mom messed this pumpkin invitation up, but it turned out to be B’s favorite. It was referred to as the “Amish pumpkin” because she thought it looked like it had a beard like they often do, hehe.
These made B* curious about the party. “Am I having a Halloween party? My friends think it’s going to be a Halloween party. Are there going to be pumpkins at my party? Why do they look like pumpkins then?” We teased her about being crazy. “There’s no way we’d do a Halloween party! Stop asking about Halloween….it’s not for another 3 weeks, geesh.” She was skeptical, but still clueless until she and her friends got off the bus the day of her party and were greeted with a fully decorated family room and a blocked off dining room that was even more decorated.
The pictures are all taken in the light, but you can imagine it all in the dark, right?
(I don’t seem to have a final picture of this, but all of the computer desk and such over there was covered in brick and spiderweb, too)
(Yes, that’s my kitty who decided to be part of the action….doesn’t it look like she’s under the moonlight?)
(Less thrilled about being photographed from this side)
Decorations are cool and all, but that meant all the kids looked out of place. My mom still has all the old costumes from the last many years, so it was nothing for us to have an entire huge tub full of costumes for all the kids to put on (over their own clothes). And both before and after the food/cake/presents portion of the party, they traded costumes, got into character, and had a blast playing dress-up.
Here’s a handful of censored group shots so you can get the idea without me showing you the dozens and dozens of cotume ideas they came up with. They had some spectacular combinations using costume pieces that were drastically different (like a devil out of pirate costumes or princess stuff turned into dead bride attire).
(Dead bride, “gothic princess fairy bride thing” as she named it, and cowboy pirate)
Alright, I think that’s it for now. Onto the food next! The food is the most important, but you’d be surprised how much more enhanced it all is with a little attention to detail like decorations and fun, hehe.
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