Emmy turns Five

Emmy turned five on Thursday! More pictures are in the Picasa album. 

She was up at 6:30 ready to open presents.  She got a new bike with pedals (she has had a balance bike for a couple of years) with a basket and a bell for it, and a new game.

 After school we met Keaton, Adelaide, Lorelei and Miss Beth for lunch at Chick-Fil-A (her choice) and shared mini cupcakes from a local cupcake bakery with them. She requested their lemonade flavor and Mommy and Pickled Peaches requested the chocolate with peanut butter frosting.  She had a busy day of phone calls, Skype/FaceTime calls and trying out her new bike. She requested her favorite shepherd's pie potatoes for supper, topped off with of course another cupcake and the annual birthday sign photos.

And today (which is also Grandma's birthday, Happy Birthday Grandma!) we had her Cooking Birthday Party. This Mama is tired but it was a success, so far as I can tell. There were in the end, I think, 22 children here today and it was chaos, but not terribly so. Everyone seemed to have fun, the kids enjoyed making pizzas and decorating cupcakes and their fruit and veggies with ranch and strawberry lemonade, especially requested by the birthday girl. The adults seemed enjoyed their food (antipasto platter, Ms. Barbara Lee's sun dried tomato dip with veggies and crackers, caramelized onion and goat cheese bread, pizzas, mimosas, beer and tea) and a some even enjoyed making their own pizzas, too.

I did a terrible job of remembering to take photos, it was too crazy. Fortunately my friend Lindsay snapped a few after I set my camera down.   Here are some photos and more details about the party.

 I feel like I got a lot of questions this year about how we came up with the idea, so for anyone interested, here is a more details on the plan, if you really want to know. 

Emmy loves Curious George and one of her favorite stories is Curious George and the Pizza Party. So that is where the basic idea came from.  I knew with so many kids invited/coming that actually measuring, mixing, and cooking would be hard, so I saved time and sanity and we made biscuit pizzas, a'la 7th grade Home Economics.   We prepped all the toppings earlier in the week: marinara, mozzarella, parm, hamburger, onions, peppers, mushrooms (fresh, but sauteed before hand), Canadian bacon, and of course pepperoni, the mini kind were fun for the small pizzas. I put some of the toppings in muffin tins and cheese and sauce in big bowls and gave each child a parchment (intended to line cake pans) and wrote their name on it so they could go right on the baking sheets and we would know which pizza belonged to whom. It worked perfectly! I had them come in to make them in shifts since my kitchen is not that big! More counter space would have made the whole day a lot less hectic, but it worked fine and my awesome husband some of the other mom friends of mine helped out a ton (thank you!!).

The cake idea came from another blog.  Sarah designed the fabulous invitations again this year, as well as the recipe card for the favors. I found red aprons at Hobby Lobby for each child (thanks Mom, Mrs. Raney, and Mary Ann for sending them from SC and GA when HL ran out online and I couldn't get enough at our local stores!). I ordered paper chef hats, as well as a set of small rolling pins so several kids could roll their dough at the same time.   For the favor bags, Emmy and I stamped the bags with cooking stamps and a thank you stamp. I wrote the note on the bags and she stamped, it was a fun project. This way each child had a bag to take their apron, hat and favor home in. The favors were cookie cutters with a recipe for play dough attached. I managed to get the bags on sale, as well as the thank you stamp and I already had ink pads, so it was really all a fairly inexpensive project.

For the apron cake, I made the Pioneer Woman's chocolate sheet cake and baked it in a 13X9 (delish) and used my usual butter cream.  My friend Sara recommended a yellow cake recipe to me, and I'm so glad she did! I have been looking for a good yellow cake and it was delish, and so was her chocolate butter cream. I didn't take any pictures of the cupcake decorating, sadly, but here are the last few rejects that I slapped the leftover frosting on. Yellow cake with chocolate frosting is one of my favorites. Thanks Sara!

One of my favorite budget friendly finds were the drink cups, small red solo cups with lids. Score! They came with straws, but I used the red and white and blue and white striped straws I'd already purchased.  It worked perfectly and I was able to write names on the cups in advance.  Juice boxes, in my opinion, always make a mess because the kids squeeze them and they spill, plus they suck one down so you need to count on two per child, which gets expensive.  This was a great, cheaper, spill friendly alternative.  And they are recyclable, so after the party I just rinsed them and tossed them in the recycling bin.

So there you go, far more than you wanted to know about Emmy's 5th birthday party!