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We had a two part celebration this year: a tea party and a bowling party. The tea party was attended by Aunt Tana, Grandma, Aunt Claudia, and Bella, Nathan and Ollie. I spent the morning shopping, baking and cooking away, and soon became overwhelmed with how much work there was to do! I forgot a bunch of ingredients at the store, everything took longer than it should have (of course!) and keeping the kids from fighting over helping was not easy either. I had to scrap the blueberry scones from the menu. But the kids had a great time helping me dip the chocolate strawberries, making the little quiches, and especially assembling the edible arrangement. I could see the magic in their faces and that made me really glad to have them involved. The food turned out well, the table that Ingrid had the kids set and decorate looked beautiful, and we all enjoyed some sinful little foods. And most importantly, Ingrid got to have a “real” tea party at last.

For the rest of the family, we had a bowling party at the local alley here in Redwood City. I baked the cakes at Claudia’s house (another disastrous undertaking), and brought home what was salvageable. The mini 4-inch and 6-inch tiers were white cake with raspberry mouse filling and the 9-inch tier was chocolate with Oreo cookies and cream filling. Well the chocolate cake stuck to the pan too much because I’d forgotten my parchment paper and so that was unusable; the raspberry mousse was perfect until I added the other half of the puree and then it flopped into a liquidy mess. So what we did instead is just a mini 2-tier white cake with cookies and cream filling, hot pink buttercream icing with nice little decorations, including some flowers that Ingrid had piped and frozen a few days before. And we bought a big half sheet chocolate cake from Safeway which Ingrid also loved. It worked out well, I got to make my little cake for her and the chocoholics got their wish too.

We all had a ball bowling, who knew bowling could be so fun? Ingrid and I loved loved loved making buttercream flowers, and coloring our buttercream. We spent an evening learning and freezing the ones that looked OK. Ingrid told me: mommy this is the best day of my life! I kinda felt that way too, after watching countless episodes of Cake Boss we have both been itching to try it out for ourselves. The dilemma now is how to keep up our new hobby. I’ve already left a message with Claudia suggesting a cupcake decorating party, just for fun : )

I made these swan cream puffs from a recipe online. They came out GREAT! My favorite item at the party. The filling was instant vanilla pudding but the dough I made myself (super easy) and I piped the necks with a bag and round tip. The wings are just the top third of the biscuit, cut in half and stuck into the pudding. Yummers, can’t wait to make these again some day…

Lego men that daddy made out of chocolate!

This entry was posted on Thursday, September 2nd, 2010 at 12:21 pm and is filed under Uncategorized. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. Both comments and pings are currently closed.