Skylanders Party Planning - Part 7, THE PARTY!

At long last – I present to you... the summary of our Skylanders party. 

Yes, it has been over two months since said party took place, but better late than never, eh?

The activities went over really well.  The kids loved moving from station to station and acquiring crystals and gems to fill their customized pouches (tutorials on how to sew them and stencil them with fabric paint here).

The archery targets looked great and the flame arrows were really fun as well. 

Next time I would trim the flames down a bit to make it easier to nock the arrows.

The treasure hunt to find the treasure rocks went well.  And I was really pleased with how the treasure rocks turned out.  I used this tutorial:  Treasure Rocks.

The kids loved the ice orb smash and the tongue grabber game.

The wall of streamers was meh.  I ran out of time and wasn't able to put up as much as I wanted.  If it had been finished, I think it would have been fab.  Even incomplete, it added a nice pop to the yard.

I was very pleased with the rest of the décor. 

Streamers behind the food table provided a colorful focal point.

I was happy with my goofy centerpieces.  I used my elixir bottles and filled them with colorful beads for ballast.

I have to say that tissue tassels are definitely my new favorite thing.  After the party, I snipped the tassels off of the string, sorted by color, strung them on pipe cleaners, and hung them in the craft room to use for another time.

Sadly, the portal punch was a fail – I forgot that the pumpkin lights really only work in the dark.  Boo.  But the punch was good and the portal cardboard surround I made had a strong presence on the table.

We had too much food, as usual, but I don’t care – I love having the variety available.  Pizza, chips, water melon, and pineapple for lunch. 

The sweets table turned out really well, although we did end up moving it indoors to escape the oppressive humidity and voracious mosquitoes.  We made marshmallow pops dipped in pop rocks.  I displayed them in a diner-style shaker filled with pom-poms.

We also had chocolate dipped pretzels, a mini-cake with a simple buttercream stripe pattern topped with the logo on strwas, cupcakes with character and logo toppers, and my personal favorite - the Chompie Truffles.  I thought the red fangs made from candy cane jimmies (sorry – showing my Delaware roots – jimmies are sprinkles) were fun.

I was also excited to serve pre-scooped ice cream.  I bought mini-mason jars and put a scoop of vanilla bean in each the night before.  It was so easy to pull them out and stack them up on the sweets table.  I have a thing about sticky hands and drippy sticky containers, so I will be doing this from now on.  This little step easily reduced my stress level by several clicks.

For favors, we gave out silver take-out treat boxes.

They were filled with the same red and gold cello used for the flame arrows, which was very frugal of me, I think.

Inside we put:
Trigger Happy Chocolate Coins

Double Trouble Gumball Orbs (still leftover from Easter - will we never be done with these freaking gumballs?!?)

 Pop Fizz Pop Rocks (Dollar Tree)

 Zap's Sea Slime (Target Dollar Section)

 And Hex's Bone Erasers (no pic of those, unfortunately.  They were in the Target Dollar section with the grilling-themed stuff.)

Checkerboard Kit-Kat Cake

As I've mentioned before, I am cake-challenged.  When I need a cake, I try to put a lot of thought into the plans to make sure that it's something I can do successfully.  My oh-so-practical daughter helps me to stay humble on track.  We'll look at cakes online and she'll say, "Do you REALLY think you can make that, Mommy?  Remember the castle cake..."  She'll totally discourage me from trying something if she thinks it's too ambitious.  She is wise beyond her years.

So for this birthday, I wanted to do something that was fun and likely to be a hit with a group of kids, but most importantly, was within the scope of my abilities.  I saw something called a Kit-Kat Cake on Pinterest and thought that with a few tweaks (making a checkerboard cake and swapping the regular M&M's for specialty ones in her fave colors of aqua, lime, teal, and purple), it would fit the bill.

As mentioned before, I always like to do a demo cake if I can.  Once again, it was well worth the trouble and expense.  I realized many things...  1st that 1 box of cake mix was not enough to yield cake layers tall enough to match up with the Kit-Kat sticks.  I also ran out of blue batter and it was very hard to match the hue later with only a small amount of batter (see the dark greenish bit in the center - that was trying to be blue). 

I also did not have enough Kit-Kats!  For the demo, I purchased 4 of the king-size ones and was short several sticks.  Doh!

Learnings here - this cake needs 2 boxes of mix to yield taller layers.  One box-worth of batter should be tinted green and the other box tinted blue.  2 cans of frosting would be good as well.  And 5 king-size Kit-Kats are definitely be in order.  The amount of M&M's was good - about a pound.

I also learned that I should not do the frosting and Kit-Katting too far in advance.  The demo cake was made a day before eating and even though it was stored in a sealed cake carrier, the Kit-Kats definitely had a stale taste to them.  For the real cake, I baked it a day before, let cool overnight, and frosted and added Kit-Kats just a little before.

To achieve the checkerboard effect, I used my handy-dandy checkerboard cake kit.  I received it as gift from my hubby for our 1st Christmas as husband and wife - aww!  It consists of three round pans, each with a detachable plastic insert that looks like a 3-ring bulls eye.  The idea is to alternate the layers of color - 2 pans should have the same pattern and the third should be the opposite.  So if 2 pans are blue green blue, the third should be green blue green.  You add the batter, remove the inserts, and bake normally.  When assembling, put blue green blue on the bottom, then green blue green, then top with blue green blue.  When the cake is cut, it looks checkered.  My tip for adding the colored batter...  spoon your batter into a large ziploc baggie, snip off a end (make a deep snip - about an inch), and pipe it in.  It's much easier than trying to spoon or pour the batter into the rings.  Another tip is to choose a recipe that makes a fairly thick batter - the ring inserts are not attached to the bottom of the pan, so a really runny batter would seep under the inserts and ruin the effect.  I made this with Pillsbury Butter recipe mix (don't judge!), which yields a really nice, thick batter and a sturdy, dense cake.

Here's the finished product.

I was very pleased with it!  After baking and cooling overnight, the assembly of the cake only took about 30 minutes.  That let a little time to pop it in the fridge before leaving for the party (it was 94oF and HUMID on the day, so we wanted to chill it a bit as a preemptive strike against melty fosting.) 
The checkerboard effect was very cool - I love my checkerboard cake pan!  I wish that I had taken a close-up of the inside of the cake, but as I mentioned, it was 94oF and HUMID and - surprise!  The facility wasn't airconditioned.  So I was a little off my game with heat delirium.  Sorry!  You can sort of see it here...

And lastly, I topped the cake with a homemade pennant.  I used twine and scrapbook paper to make it.  I wanted to spell out my daughter's name, but she insisted on "10" and "M" only.  This being my 1st go-round with a cake pennant, they ended up a little wonky.  I wasn't sure that the straws would stay up unsupported, so I threaded bamboo skewers through the straws for extra oomph.  Unfortunately, the skewers I brought were longer than the straws, so I had to deeply angle them to not show.  Next time - shorter or no skewers are the way to go.

This cake was a HUGE hit with kids AND adults.  I'm adding this to my easy showstopper arsenal...  Kit Kat Cake, meet Rose Cake!

Cake Fails and Triumphs

I love to bake and I love fancy party cakes, but I'm sort of "freewheeling" about it.  I've never had any formal training or classes, although I have TRIED to take the local Wilton classes.  (They always seem to get cancelled on me.)  So I've found my own way and it works for me.

Let your cakes cool exposed to the air:  I was always under the impression that if I left my cakes uncovered while cooling that they would dry out.  Not so!  I always bake my cakes at least a day in advance and leave them out for at least 12 hours uncovered to cool.  If you cover them, condensed steam will make the exterior too moist and your layers and frosting will be slip-slidin' away.  Leaving them uncovered also seems to let the cake itself settle and strengthen.  It is less likely to crumble and break.

Level your cakes:  There is a nifty tool you can buy at the craft store (use a coupon!) that yields perfectly level layers every time.  Buy it and use it!  Irregular layers, domed or concave tops, and the like will yield lumpy, misshapen cakes prone to falling apart.  Wilton Ultimate Cake Leveler

Don't overextend yourself:  All cake really needs to be is yummy.  You don't have to make something elaborate for it to work.  And almost any idea can be distilled into a simpler version - just be creative.  Check out the Backyardigans cake below for more on this.

Do a test run if at all possible:  This may be hard for us thrifty people, but it is a very, very good idea.  The last thing you want is to end up with no cake on the day of your event because you ran into a logistical problem.  It may not be feasible in all situations, but I definitely recommend demo'ing what you can.  Some of my fails below...

Lego Cupcakes Fail
This was a demo fail, thank goodness.  I decided to make cupcakes from scratch and tried new cupcake recipes - the yellow one was delicious and beautiful just out of the oven but upon cooling, the size reduced considerably.  Who wants to eat a cupcake 1/2" high?  The chocolate recipe had an inexplicable fishy aftertaste.  Fish cupcakes?  Yuck.  I also tried a cooked frosting recipe.  I followed the directions to the letter, but it never whipped up and ended up being a gloppy glaze instead.  And my chocolate Lego toppers, while the idea was cute, it looked ridiculous in reality, given the dimished size of the cupcakes and the flat frosting.  So glad I didn't have to serve these to people...

Castle Cake Fail
I went wrong here by not fully cooling and leveling the cakes.  After assembly, the turrets immediately started to collapse and my poor castle looked like it was sacked by the Huns.  My husband suggested that we try to buttress the turrets by threading wooden kebab skewers through the cake.  Because everyone loves a cake full of splinters!  Yum!  There was no demo cake in this instance, so picture me frantically calling bakeries the day of the party looking for ANYTHING to replace it.  Don't let this be you!

Between you and me, in retrospect, I wasn't that sad that it fell apart.  It was a supremely ugly cake.  I don't know what I was thinking.  Those jellybeans - ugh!  If you look closely at the front on your left, you will see a kebab hole.  Fancy!  Again, a dmo would have shown me that these colors and embellishments weren't going to work.

I am proud to say that I have learned from my mistakes and here are some of my triumphs.  Disclaimer - these are MY triumphs, which will likely seem underwhelming to a good baker.  This is because as you see from my fails, my personal bar is set very low.  After several baking debacles, my family is super proud of anything I make that remains intact and doesn't taste like fish or is otherwise inedible.  I don't have time to go into my other fails - the cookies that accidentally tasted like peanut butter and black licorice or the slug cookies.  (As in, they were so bad that no creature that walks, flies, or crawls would eat them - not even slugs.  Literally.  They were passed up by seagulls, feral cats, and slugs - all came, sniffed, and left.  Can slugs even smell?)

Backyardigans Cake Triumph!
I was envisioning a 5 layer cake with each one representing a different Backyardigan.  I wisely realized that 1)  this was too much cake for our little shindig and 2) no way could I pull that off.  This is what I came up with instead.  I printed the characters on card stock, cut them out, mounted on popsicle sticks, and popped them on top of the cake.  It cost no money (unlike if I had special ordered cake toppers - which by the way I find are generally off-putting when you look closely at them) and was cute and festive!

Rose Cake Triumph!
This was for a Paris in Pearls party for my 9-year-old.  I wanted an Eiffel Tower cake, but knew that was out of my wheelhouse, so I opted to reflect the theme in a different way - with a fancy rose cake.  I was planning to buy one from a local baker, but couldn't justify the $60 price tag.  Yes, $60.  They are out of their minds.  So I tried to make it myself (did a demo 1st) and it was a showstopper.  There are many tutorials out there on this cake.  Here's the one I like:  Rose Cake Tutorial
It really is that easy.  And the impact is very high.  Two things I did learn.  When I did the demo, I used a Crisco frosting and switched to a butter frosting for the real cake for better flavor.  I should have stuck with Crisco.  It was less sickly sweet and the roses were bigger and more beautiful.  You'll note that I added edible pearls to the roses.  They turned out bee-yoo-tee-full!!!