It's a Baking Party!

Sydney’s 6th Birthday Pink Carpet Princess party was pretty fantastic last year. I almost immediately started thinking, what could we do this year. That’s it!!! We both share a love for cooking and baking, Paula Deen and Giada DiLaurentis. It had to be a baking party! I had sooo many lists, so many things to buy and lots of things to make!

I did bunches of research on Baking Parties and scoured and gawked and gawked some more. Some of my favorite party websites where I found great inspiration were from Amy Atlas Events, Tip Junkie, Pizzazzerie and Birthday Party Ideas.

I chose the colors - hot pink, light pink, mint, yellow, white, turquoise and light blue. So, I first started out by making tissue paper flowers in all these colors to hang from the ceiling. I needed to make big ones, small ones, pointy ones and scalloped ones. Overall, I think I ended up making about 26 of them.
I found some great tissue paper tutorials on You Tube.

As I researched, I found a cute idea for cupcake liner garland. Blake and I stayed up the night before the party stringing on the cupcake liners and coffee filters.  I think he secretly didn’t want to go to bed and he wanted to help to avoid bedtime. We made several strands and hung them in the the foyer, the kitchen and outside around the front door.

I wanted to have something cute on our door to greet all our little chefs so I got a little 8x10 canvas that I painted.  Icreated my Young Chef’s Academy sign using cardboard cutout letters that I painted and glittered up.  I added a wooden spoon, a paper chef hat and some ribbon and small tissue paper flowers.

Lately, I have been in love with all these bunting banners I keep seeing so I had to make one myself.  I found a template to help me out.  I made it out of paper instead of fabric and didn't sew it. 

I wanted each girl to have their own apron and since I don’t sew {YET}, I had to get them from Hobby Lobby. I ended up going with the plain white ones (except Sydney's was pink) and wanted to girly them up with trim.  So, I added chiffon flowers at the top and some leopard lace around the pocket. All done with the magic of one of my most favorite tools - my glue gun (ignore the wrinkles)!

My sister is so good at graphic design and digital scrapbooking that I knew I wanted her to design the invitation.  Unfortunately, I had trouble printing some of them out and came up with an alternative. On a spring trip to Round Top, I bought a big handful of old, vintagey spoons and this gave me my idea. Hobby Lobby has really cute baking ribbon, so I glittered up the spoons and attached them to the invitations, here’s the final look:

When the girls arrived, they got their apron and started a baking word search found HERE.

Next, the the girls started making their own pizzas. I found a really great website called The Glittered Nest and Terri's a fellow Texan! She had some great baking party ideas and a super yummy pizza dough recipe that is now my favorite. I made all the pizza dough in advance since it has to rise. I divided it equally and floured up the clean counter tops and let the girls roll out and shape their dough.  Then they added sauce, cheese and toppings. Most chose plain ole' pepperoni. But just in case there were some adventurers, I had hamburger meat, pepperoni, pineapple, black olives, green peppers and basiI. I used a plain pizza sauce from a jar.

I don’t have two ovens unfortunately, so I had to send a couple of the pizzas to my next door neighbor’s oven so they would all be able to eat them together. I baked the pizzas on parchment paper lined cookie sheets and used a sharpie to write their names by the pizzas.

While the pizzas were in the oven, the girls began decorating their own 6-inch cakes. I bought four cake tins at Hobby Lobby and also used 8-inch cake boards.  I wrote each girl’s name on it prior to the party to save time. I used Duncan Hines yellow cake mix and began baking the cakes a few days before the party. I wrapped them in plastic and stuck them in the freezer. I couldn’t decide if I wanted to make a couple different colors of icing but decided it would just be easier to stick with white. I used Rachael Ray’s Cupcake Icing for a Crowd recipe. It was so yummy, by the way!!

I got a bunch of plastic containers and filled them with all different kinds of candy.

My birthday girl!

The girls LOVED decorating their cakes and eating the candy too!  They were so creative!

Finally, all the little chefs sat down to watch the Birthday Chef open all her presents. Each girl sat in the chair next to Sydney as she opened their present and I took their pictures.  Lemonade Mouth premiered on The Disney Channel that night, so they watched as their moms began to arrive to pick them up.

Sydney and her cousin Alexa

Sydney and her best friend Brooklyn

I wanted to come up with a cute goodie bag idea to go along with our Baking Party theme. Thank goodness for Dollar Tree since at this point, I didn’t want to spend much more. I bought three different sweet treat mixes - sugar cookie, fudge brownie and chocolate chip. We dumped the baking mixes into cellophane bags and printed baking instructions on a separate card for each and attached a wooden spoon and a bag of sprinkles with the cute baking ribbon I used on the invitations. As the girls left, each one could choose what they wanted to bake at home.

The party was a hit and I could not have pulled it off without the help from my family…Blake helped me make cupcake garland, my mother-in-law came over the day of the party and chopped toppings for pizza, made cake icing, washed dishes, filled the goodie bags and my mom and sister helped at the party and also with the dreaded clean up!  There was candy ALL over the floor, but that’s ok, the girls (all 14 of them) had a blast!

Worn out!!!