Making Birthday Cupcakes with the Kids

This Sunday is our momstown Winnipeg Birthday Party so of course this months momstown curriculum is all about Birthday! So for our Junior Chef's program the children are learning how to make cupcakes and will get a chance to decorate cupcakes too!

I decided to practice my recipe to see if it was kid friendly and kid approved (for taste)! Well okay, I was just in the mood for a cupcake, but use whatever excuse you need to make! :)

My daughter helped measure, pour and stir. There may have been some finger licking happening!

The best part was decorating the cupcakes!

The end result!

Here's the recipe that we found online.

Ingredients:

• 1 1/2 Cups Cake Flour
• 1 1/2 Teaspoons Baking Powder
• 1/4 Teaspoon of Salt
• 1/2 Cup Unsalted Butter
• 1 Cup Sugar
• 2 Large Eggs (room temperature)
• 1/2 Teaspoon Vanilla Extract
• 1/2 Cup Whole Milk

Directions:

1. Preheat the over to 400 degrees F. Add flour, baking powder, and salt into a mixing bowl. Beat in the butter (bits at a time) using the electric mixer on low sped. 
2. Beat in the sugar and eggs. Add the vanilla and milk and beat on medium to hight until blended. Do not over beat.
3. Divide the batter into 24 mini-muffin or 12 large muffin pans. Bake for 10 to 12 minutes. Let it cool. 
4. Place icing of your choice. My secret icing recipe is called Betty Crocker. Do you know it? It's fabulous! :)  To make it go to your local grocery store and place it in your shopping cart. And there you have it! One fabulous icing for your cupcakes.
5. Sprinkle with your candy / sprinkles of your kid's choice. Be sure to involve your kid in the shopping experience and let them have a say in the toppings. They will remember that experience just as much as the baking portion. 
6. And most importantly have fun! Don't sweat it if some egg shells fall into the batter. It's about the kids learning how to bake. It will be messy! Be prepared for them to wander away half way through leaving you to finish the baking. They'll still be proud and remember the day that they made cupcakes!

Enter to win a $20 Gift Card to Tim Hortons - CLOSED

Did you hear? We are celebrating our Birthday and want to thank the Winnipeg community for the overwhelming support we have had this year, so we've invited everyone we know!! We made our goal of '100 families Going' to the event through our Facebook event page and are giving away a $20 Gift Card to Tim Hortons.  Because we know how much we mama's and papa's love our coffee!! We'll be sure to have another contest once we reach 150 Going, so keep on sharing the event and invite your family and friends with wee little ones at home!

So it's simple. In order to win it, we just want to know your favourite themed birthday party that you've ever planned. Could be for your kids, yourself, your husband, friend, brother, sister, parent, ect. You get the picture! So comment below and remember to leave me your email address or momstown user name so I can contact the winner.  And just for fun, if you have a photo of your Birthday Party be sure to share it with all of us on our momstown Winnipeg Facebook page.

Contest ends midnight this Sunday, July 29, 2012.  Contest open to all guests living in the Winnipeg area who have signed up to attend our Birthday Bash this August 19.

For details of our Birthday Party click here. Good luck!

And Random.org picked entry #1. And the winner is............

mommyJ

Congrats mommyJ. And thank you everyone who participated!

Get creative with a Dr. Seuss themed party!

My daughter loves to read! And she is a little silly, as most 3 year olds are. So I wanted to throw a fun, wacky birthday party for her.  So with the help of pinterest I got some fabulous ideas on a Dr. Seuss themed birthday party.

1) First off, location. I knew right away the place to have it. The Children's Museum is a fun, wacky and colourful place. Perfect for a Dr. Seuss themed party!

2) Invitations. Well I sort of delayed myself on this, so I sent out e-invites to avoid postal delays. Otherwise I would have gone with a mailed invitation. Something about receiving an invitation in the mail that still excited me! Here's a great example of a Dr. Seuss invitation, that looks like a book.

Click here to see more of this invitation.

3) Guest list. This really depends on how big or small you want to go. I really am a big believer of to each their own. Some people like big parties, some like small gatherings. Last year we skipped my daughter's birthday because we just moved back home to Winnipeg. So mama guilt got the best of me and I went BIG!

These were just some of the guests!

4) The food. This part was fun to get my creative juices flowing. It's easier and a lot simpler then it appears. All the ideas are all ready out there. Creative names and presentation make simple food look like hours of work. Here's a great blog that inspired me.

The spread! It's all in the presentation. So simple. I worded the food on Dr. Seuss labels based on characters or objects from Dr. Seuss books. Like a Cheese Tree, Sam I Am Hamwiches, Yertles Blueberries and Green Eggs.

I bought the water bottle labels off etsy.

I made my own cupcakes. You can't tell but the blue icing is standing up like the hair of Thing 1 and Thing 2.

Who Pudding and Blue Goo! Pudding and Jello. Simple and easy to make.

5) The activities. The kids got to make and wear Dr. Seuss hats. They also made goo, an activity that the museum provides. But if you host this at home I would get the kids to make Oobleck!  Then benefit of having a party outside the home in places such as the Children's Museum is that the kids got to run around and play in the museum. So less activities for mom to plan! 

Other activities you could do is pin the egg on the ham, read a Dr. Seuss book, make a wacky Dr. Seuss inspired craft or set up the inflatable pool and place cut outs of fish and have the kids fish with a fishing rod. We did a lot of these activities at our momstown Dr. Seuss Birthday Party!

6) The decorations. I actually had a hard time finding Dr. Seuss decorations at the store so I had to be creative. I bought cheap wooden A, B, C letters at Walmart and painted them. I found some cute stuff of etsy too. I printed some Dr. Seuss quotes that I bought off etsy and placed them in cheap black frames I got from Dollerama. And I placed all our Dr. Seuss books around the room as part of the decorations.  I used colourful bowls for the food and that was pretty much it.  

7) The loot bags. I wanted to give something useful, so they each got a Dr. Seuss book with some stickers. A few older kids got book markers instead as I figured Dr. Seuss would be a tad too easy for their reading level.

So that's our Dr. Seuss Party. The only regret was I didn't take more photos. It was a fun party to plan and my daughter talked about it for weeks!

On The Farm Birthday Party

We celebrated Calista’s second birthday today! I love party planning and I’ll be honest, I’ve been brainstorming party ideas since well before her first birthday.  My husband said that I’m not allowed to start planning her third birthday until two months before. Little does he know the power of ideas that flow from Pinterest!

I chose to put together an On the Farm/Barnyard themed party. Calista enjoys making various animal noises and pointing out different animals. During a bike ride through Birds Hill Park, she was in awe when she saw horses up close. My childhood summers were also spent on my grandparents’ farm in Saskatchewan and I have very fond memories of being on a farm. All in all, it was the great theme to choose!

The food table:

• Napkins and cutlery were wrapped to look like carrots. I wrapped orange napkins around green cutlery and secured it with green ribbon. 

• I found the pony cake on the Betty Crocker website and printed off the template to cut out the shapes.  After the cake was baked and cooled, my husband helped me assemble and my mom and I decorated the cake.  It was a bit of a rushed job since the assembly and decoration started about 40 minutes before people arrived (note to self for next year: allocate more time for cake decorating).  

• For beverages, I served Moo Juice (chocolate milk) and well water (not really well water). 

• I made cute little signs with cardstock, markers and popsicle sticks describing things that are found on a farm.  There was a vegetable patch, a fruit orchard, hay, and tractor wheels.  Pretzels were used for the “hay” and wraps (because they are round) were the “tractor wheels”. 

• Baskets are found all over farms so it was fitting to carve one out of a watermelon and put the birthday girl’s initials on it. 

For decorations and invitations, we kept things very simple.  I purchased barnyard themed invitations along with the matching decorations from the store, Party Stuff.  The decorations contained 5 different cardboard cut-outs of various farm animals that I placed around the room in addition to the one balloon that came with the set.  Easy peesy!  As a thank you for coming to Calista’s party, I gave her little friends a book and stickers to do with “farms” that I purchased at Dollarama.

The activities that I planned were very age appropriate for Calista and her buddies.  We blew bubbles, sang Old McDonald Had a Farm and I read the story Barnyard Dance by Sandra Boynton.  A fellow momstown momma gave me some cardboard cut-outs of barnyard animals that she used for one of her child’s birthdays.  I glued popsicle sticks on to them and created props to go along with Old McDonald.  I loved watching my husband use the props (his inner child has really come alive a lot more in the past two years!).  

The party was two hours long starting at 11am which was a perfect time to do everything that I had envisioned and the kiddos were more than ready for nap time (mom and dad too!).  The barnyard theme gave me a chance to be creative and to create some wonderful memories and pictures that I can look back on in the years to come.  It was a wonderful party spent with loved ones!

This article was written by our guest blogger Christina, who sure knows how to throw a party! 

Ahoy Matey! How to Have a Pirate Themed Party!

Saturday was Braxton’s third birthday. To celebrate, we threw a pirate party.  Braxton wanted to wear a striped orange shirt and blue shorts – perfect pirate attire.  We chose to keep the party small, 4 friends, 1 brother and the birthday boy.

For the invitations, I used www.evite.com.  It was simple and efficient. If you want to make your own invitations, here are some great ideas:

For decorations, I used general “pirate” stuff – a treasure map tablecloth, black, blue and red balloons and homemade banner.

As the children arrived, I gave them bandannas, eyepatches, swords, and they decorated a parrot, that can be found here. Then we played a few games, read the book Shiver Me Letters: A Pirate’s ABC, had free play, ate lunch, went on a treasure/scavenger hunt, ate cake, and opened presents.

For food I served pirate themed food:

• Fish ‘n Chips – goldfish and potato chips
• Swords – pretzels
• Gold Doubloons – Chicken Nuggets
• Cannonballs – grapes
• Sailboats – egg salad served in halved red peppers. find recipe here.

For activities, I tried to incorporate the pirate theme. We played “Pin the Eyepatch on the Skull & Crossbones.

A treasure/scavenger hunt for their goody bags.  I wrote the clues in pirate lingo, but since the kids were 2-4 years old I also had a picture clue on the reverse side.

We found the treasure!

For the goody bags, print out your own labels, filled brown paper lunch sacks and tied them with brown raffia ribbon to make them look like loot sacks.

The cake I found online and can be found here.

It was a great party, I feel the kids and moms had a great time!