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.

Now for a girl's first birthday cake

Design ideas

After looking on the internet for ideas for my little girls first birthday, I had two criteria, one it had to be simple and two it needed to have some items that could be taken off and kept (like my boys train and cubes from his first cake).

This 1st Birthday Party supplies page has some cakes on it, including a baby pulling down a cake but was much too complicated, but perhaps I could include a baby on my cake somehow? It also showed a lovely cake with a girl on the top, and spots over the cake itself. I really like this cake. This two coloured cake of pink and green was lovely, and the bear very cute. 

With these, and my daughters cot toys, in mind I got out my iPad and using a Paper app I started sketching out ideas. These are not shared here as I am a TERRIBLE drawer and they are awful!! However they helped me pull together a couple of thoughts. 

The Plan

So I had a basic design, and I was going to reuse the recipe from my little boys cake. First it was off to the cake shop in Shrewsbury Market Hall (the ladies are so lovely and helpful) to get my supplies, I even managed to save a little by getting some flower paste icing on sale to make the baby skin (and with a little food colouring the dress too!).

Second it was tripling up the recipe and getting all the ingredients, this is because the recipe is for one 6" cake and I wanted to make two 8" cakes to put on top of each other with some butter icing. I had set aside Friday before the party (Sunday) to get the cake cooked and iced, although the other half was off too I was hoping to send him off on the bike or something!

The Reality

In fact I started the characters on Thursday evening, as I was loosing sleep about how to do them. This turned out to be a good thing as they took much longer than expected to make. I'm sure if I had all the tools and some training they would be dead easy to make but each character took approx 2 hours!! The first one made was the bunny, which used toothpicks to hold head to body and ears to head. 

Friday morning I baked the cakes, these are a bit more dense than normal egg cakes but still taste yummy and the cake was polished off at the party which I took to be a good sign. They did take approx 2 more mins to cook than on the recipe, and the first sank a fair bit in the middle. Otherwise I did not modify this at all. After the cakes had cooled it was time to stick them together with a fair bit of butter icing (the two tops together so they didn't look sunken with icing on). I then stuck the cakes in the fridge to let the icing go hard before adding the jam, marzipan and royal icing to the cake. While they were in the fridge, I made the little baby girl/doll.  This was using flower paste icing as it let me go finer in rolling out for the dress and hair. I used toothpicks to hold arms and head to the body.

Once the cake had the base icing on it was time to stick on the spots and make the monkey (this was a copy of a toy that my daughter was given at birth by her Nana and Granddad). I ended up doing this on Friday night once the kids had gone to bed, so I was pretty tired at this point so it wasn't brilliant. Anyway the final cake....

...

Daughters first birthday cake

That time of the year - The Third Birthday Minion Cake

13:Well it's that time of the year and it has come around very quickly this year - the dreaded Birthday. Last year I cheated on the cake and managed to buy an egg free cake suitable for turning into a lorry for my chaps birthday. This year I'm going to attempt to make it from scratch - wish me luck! I'm planning a Despicable Me minion cake - I will update this post as I go along.

The Plan

The recipe: http://www.food.com/recipe/easy-eggless-sponge-cake-3069

The Design

Rather than putting this in a round cake as the recipe suggests I will be trying this in a rectangle cake tin to make the minion (mine is going to lye down rather than sit up, as per this: http://sprinklesandcrumbs.blogspot.co.uk/2011/06/cakes-break-then-more-cakes.html). I want to make two cakes, sticking them together with some butter icing and jam to give it some decent dimensions. I will use marzipan and icing for the decoration.

As I'm a waste not want not kinda girl I'm planning to mix the left over crumb cakes to turn into some mini minions. (A combination of these How to make fondant minions and Crumbled Cake Mini Minions).

The Reality..

11:45am - Oven warming up, I had planned to double this recipe to cook twice in a rectangular cake tin, however double the recipe only filled the tin once, so my minion will now be a bit thinner than I thought. 

12:45pm - after discussions with mum and other half decided to make a second cake after all...without  the sweetened condensed milk I have tried a hybrid recipe using my flaxseed. 

175g self raising flour, sugar and margarine (again running out of butter!), 3 tbl flaxseed & 9 tbl water, 2 tbl orange juice, 1 tsp of baking powder. This is in the oven. Fingers crossed!

1:05pm - umm flatter than the first cake, as other half would say, more biscuit! Plus took out of tin too soon so broken all down in one corner

1:30pm cool enough to build....

• Stuck the two cakes together using jam and butter, rebuilding the brocken corner at same time with the butter icing.
• A thin layer of marzipan added to the cake, suck on with more jam. I think I've used nearly a third of a jar! Then covered the whole cake with some yellow icing I've mixed up. 
• Hair done with liquorice cut in half, stuck with water
• Eye was done by cutting out white icing with a cup, using the outside of the cup to make the googles with grey icing, once the grey icing was dry I coloured over it with a silver writing icing. The brown eye was created by melting chocolate and the black dot just left over icing.
• Hands, roll a tube of black icing and cut with a knife twice to make the three fingers, then stretch out the top to fit over the ends of the arms.

16:00pm Done! Very tired now. Shan't be making the mini minions, haven't had lunch or anything so left over cake & a cuppa now!

Note - buy ready made black icing! I swear it feels half the time has been spent trying to get the icing black!