Lego birthday party - off topic

Yes my son is Lego crazy and as such I became Mum - Project Manager and planned a Lego theme for his birthday. He also requested a Spiderman cake so that was on the agenda too. I scoured the internet for ideas, saved links from different sites and then went stir crazy! This took a fair bit of planning ahead as I work as well - thankfully the crayons could be done bit by bit. I did the sweets a week before the party.

My main guide for planning was this wonderful blog http://cleof.blogspot.co.uk/2010/07/lego-birthday-party.html 

First things first was getting the Invites right, I used the idea of VIP invites as the link above suggests, then I followed this guide on creating Lego font (although it wasn't 100% as I had to create bigger borders in slightly different ways but it worked out in the end - sorry I didn't note the steps at the time). I will update this post as no doubt will  be doing it again ;-) I got the lanyards off Amazon. Everything was printed on card and just used a hole punch for the corner. I think laminating it would have been a nice touch if you have one.

Then it was to plan the Party Bags (this doesn't show the sweets as they were in process of being made at this point). The clear bags used for holding both the sweets and crayons, were from Amazon, as were the moulds for them.

• Creating the Colouring Book - again I started with the one shared from the blog mentioned above but modified it, so that it had some more female characters, and the layout worked better. See the cover and inside pages here (these were originally Word documents, and I would suggest downloading and re-saving as Word as the white out image I used to cover a grey line (rather than modify original image) on the cover is grey in the GoogleDoc). I just cut the A4 pages in half and stapled them together through the centre pages, making them close to book like as I could.
• Stickers were actually pretty disappointing from eBay - they were mostly small square and pretty boring. I put them in little plastic bags and labelled them with a pen. 
• Transfers - always popular with the kids, a better selection and larger than the stickers thank goodness - again from eBay and again I put them in little plastic bags so the stickers and transfers didn't get mixed up.
• Crayons - I got a load of basic crayons from the local pound shop, some were better than others (some created a white film over the crayon but I just left those out - I think it had something to do with the melting process rather than the quality of crayon). As each Lego brick was approx 7 crayons worth, and I had 20 kids with three bricks each that was ALOT of crayons to buy. I melted these in the microwave in a separate container and then poured into the moulds to set over night. This way the moulds didn't discolour or smell of crayon afterwards. To reduce having to clean the container each time I started with the white crayons, then yellow, then orange, then pink then red etc. I used the big bags, folded over, with Spiderman labels and then stapled. This worked for the sweets too. 
• Sweets - these were great to make I put three little guys in each bag and one big one. I used a Lego Spiderman sweet label for bags. I followed the video in the article How to Make Edible Stackable Lego Sweets to make the sweets. I did end up playing with the recipe to make my second of set of gummy men slightly squishier. With those I had to freeze to get out of the moulds whole but they were much squishier, so it is up to you which texture you prefer. I ended up using:
• 1/2 cup cold water
• 1 and a half pk Gelatine 
• 1/4 cup corn syrup (Tesco)
• 1 packet of jelly (I used pineapple flavour)

March of the sweet man

• Bags - I went for the traditional red paper bag, I was going to put the big circles on but quite frankly by the time I got to this I had lost the will to live. I got matching red lunch boxes for the kids food too.

Finally it was time to sort out the cake, I used the Amazon moulds again, in the moulds I just pushed in the relevant red and blue bits of icing, and let set overnight before pushing out. I then cut out the middle bit of the legs to make them look a bit better. I kinda wish I had used real Lego figures around the side of the cake but that could of led to arguments as to who got them, but it certainly would have saved my back! The web was created using rolled out icing and then cut into strips. I used one of the left over invites to model the hand cut out name plate and age plates that went around the side of the cake. The cake was the now traditional egg and dairy free chocolate cake recipe.