Over the edge and back

the remains of the day

If there's a key out there somewhere for a 'successful birthday party' please someone send it to me - I will need it again, in less than 365 days. The girl's 2nd Birthday party is done and over with. Because the gathering was not too large I managed to cook most of the party treats, and that's mainly because inadvertently fellow bloggers helped me with it, a few mishaps notwithstanding.

The cake itself came from a box - I didn't want to waste time on a recipe from scratch - maybe next time. So it was a french vanilla cake with buttercream filling and fondant icing (I bought that) and marzipan (I bought this as well) decorations - the theme by and large was a garden theme 'cos the l'il one loves the outdoors. It was fun putting the theme together and colouring the marzipan and creating a flower garden with bees, catterpillar and even a snail.

I got the idea for the bees from a blog called Only Slightly Pretentious Food - the rest of it is really me having a blast! Anyone looking at making marzipan at home there's a recipe at Deeba's.

Now the vanilla buttercream icing recipes on the web all sounded uniformly complicated -I absolutely hate fretting over recipes so I pulled out the simplest one from my shelf - an old cookbook belonging to my mum - its called Reader's Digest Guide to Creative Cooking and Entertaining - and the recipe is as follows (makes enough to fill and ice the tops and sides of an 8 in round cake):

Unsalted butter - 150 gm

Sieved icing sugar - 275 gm

Vanilla - 1/2 tsp

Method:

Cream the butter with a wooden spoon and gradually beat in the icing sugar and the vanilla until soft and fluffy. If you want the texture to be lighter you can add a Tbsp or 2 of milk. I didn't.

So the birthday cake was really all about assembling:

1. The cake was baked using a ready mix.

2. Bought fondant, marzipan, colours and shape cutters.

3. Made the icing for the filling and crumb coat.

4. Cake was cooled then sliced for filling, then crumb coated it with the remaining buttercream.

5. Rolled out the fondant and covered the cake - from now on you cannot refrigerate the cake so I did this on a sunday afternoon (the party was on tuesday evening).

6. Then worked on the decorations as and when I had time, usually when the girl slept, 'cos she was hell bent on helping me!

7. I completed the cake by monday evening, and within an hour I found NT had climbed over the table and taken off the lid and was literally playing in the garden! I actually caught her with a few bees in her mouth, the catterpillar was squashed and few flowers were missing not to mention the remaining wingless creatures. So it took me a few more hours in the casualty.

Meanwhile I also made mini pizzas - and pretty much followed Food Blogga's recipe for homemade pizza dough. I got about 25 mini pizza bases. I pre baked the bases, cooled and clingwrapped them in bunches and stored in room temperature. Its cooler these days so it was okay and anyway thanks to the cake the a/c was on throughout.

Couple of hours before the party I arranged the topping and baked the bases for about 10 min. The topping was a basic pizza sauce, mozzarella and parmesan cheese, a tomato, few olives, jalapeno and some more cheese.

Next up were the burgers - courtesy Stitched in Holland - the blogger Ashleigh can be now found over at Ash in Amsterdam. Made two batches of these and got about 36 burgers, reasonably large! mini burgers. Stuffed the burgers with vegetable patties, tomato, lettuce, cheese and mayo! Quite a mouthful there.

There were also loads of potato wedges and chicken nuggets - got the frozen ones and fried these - and finally, very cute cupcake pops. The process is a bit prolonged, but if you have the patience its really worth it. I highly recommend cupcake pops particularly for kids birthday parties - my lil one really loved it although she kept insisting its ice cream, whatever. Thank you, Bakerella!

pop goes the cupcake!