Feb. 12: Katie’s 11th birthday celebration

For Katie’s birthday on Wednesday, we went out for dinner with the grandparents. The kids really like Gustav’s lately, and we grown-ups are just fine with that, because HELL-OOOO! Fondue is deeeelicious.

The celebration with her friends was last night. Three girls came over around dinnertime and finally stopped giggling at 5:00 this morning. I’d be tired and exasperated and swearing off all future sleepover parties, but I went to bed at 11. Smart, no?

Katie was in charge of most of the entertainment, but OK’d a few ideas I had to keep the girls busy when they first arrived. We had dinner and then made cupcake pops. I got the cupcake mold from My Little Cupcake (totally cute, huh?) and used their recommended recipe: a package of Oreo cookies, crushed, and mixed with a brick of softened cream cheese. I was thankful for my KitchenAid appliances to get that done with very little effort, to be sure. We then dipped the cupcakes in candy melts of different colors and decorated them with sprinkles, colored sugars, and candies.

Totally messy, and look who didn’t freak out? Me, that’s who! I know, I’ve totally matured.

Totally.

Ahem.

The finished product looked nothing like the pictures in the My Little Cupcake samples, but they were tasty nonetheless, and the girls had a blast. We’re definitely going to do these again sometime.

After the cupcakes, the girls puffy-painted cupcake aprons for themselves. They were cute and creatively done, until poor Amanda’s paint bottle burst all over her apron and now she has a puffy-Jackson-Pollack cupcake apron.

The last thing I was in charge of was the cake. I got one of those cupcake cake pans…

…and made a giant cupcake cake. Because it was my first time using the pan, I was unsure of how full the sections should be when I put it into the oven. Turns out they should have been fuller than I filled them. The batter really needs to almost completely fill the two sections because it rises in the middle but not so much on the edges. I have this cool cake cutter…

…so any over-height is totally fixable. With two separate sections in the pan, Katie opted for two different flavors of cake because I suggested two different flavors before I realized that I am an idiot for suggesting such a thing. It became a tremendous pain in my arse, and many messy bowls later, the cake was complete.

Not perfect, but passable. See, if the pan had been more full, there wouldn’t be such a big difference in the sizes of the two sections. This looked a little too mushroom-y for my hyper-critical eye, but whatevs.

 

Here’s the birthday girl surrounded by her friends Phoebe, Nikki, and Amanda. These are four very sweet girls, that’s for sure.

 

 

The top layer is cherry chip; the bottom one is red velvet. You can’t really tell how perfectly RED this red velvet was, but it was. It made for a very pretty inside of the cake.

(Hey, notice the busted light switch in the background? That’s my handiwork! I was moving a bookshelf and ran right into it. Yay!)

<cough> IDIOT! <cough>

 

Here’s what I found when I came downstairs this morning. I woke the girls up, served them a confetti pancake breakfast, and sent them home. Katie’s gotten dressed, but has otherwise spent a lot of time in this exact place all day. So have the rest of us, to be honest. Why are birthday parties so exhausting?

But they are definitely fun. So much fun.