The Party: Cupcakes!

We had the Dum Ditty Drum cake at the party, but we needed some monkeys, too!
And, what flavor says monkeys like banana?

I used this recipe for the cupcakes, and this recipe for the Nutella icing.

Then I decorated the cupcakes to look like the monkeys who say, Dum Ditty Dum Ditty, Dum Dum Dum!

I used some Valentine's day M&Ms and sorted the whites and pinks. I used the pinks on the big cake and the whites for the eyes of the monkeys.
For the nose and mouth, I used a Nilla Wafer (yum!). I mixed a bit of milk with some gel food dye, and used a skinny paint brush to make the nostrils and a smile.
I read on one account of this (found on Pinterest of course), that the Nilla Wafers get soggy when applied to far in advance, so I waited till the morning of the party to apply them. They did get gross pretty quickly, but not so much soggy as stale.

Here's the finished product!

And here they all are, getting ready to be eaten!

We ended up with way more cupcakes than we needed, so we took them downstairs to the dining room of Nanna's nursing home. I tried to tell one woman what they were-- banana cupcakes with Nutella icing.  "Vanilla?" she said.
"No, Nutella. Um, it's a hazelnut spread. Chocolate and hazelnut."
"What did she say?" she asked the lady sitting next to her.
Generation gap, I guess.

The Party: Cake

The most important part of any party is the food... at a birthday party, the cake is central!
I made a chocolate cake out of a box and made it in two nine inch round pans. I made golden butter icing and dyed half of it green. The white is between the two layers and on top, with the green on the outsides.

Pink M&Ms line the drum, with pretzel sticks as decoration, pretzel rods topped with marshmallows as the drumsticks. Totally from Pinterest.

Here's the cake in action!

Esther didn't exactly know how to blow out the candle.

So I helped.

And then she ate a drumstick.

Party Prep

Esther will be 2 on Monday. I can't even believe it. Her party will be this Saturday, and I've been doing all kinds of stuff to get ready. (Unemployment is good for something, anyway.)

I've tried two different recipes for banana cakes to make the monkey cupcakes. This one won.
I tried two flavors of icing: Nutella and chocolate/peanut-butter. Nutella won.

I've been working on a sweater for Esther. (A few more inches to go!)

And a dress. (Still need to finish the bottom hem, wash, and press. I'll show you in a few days.)

And today I finished the games. The first is a ring toss, inspired by "Rings on fingers. Rings on thumb."

I scanned the page from the book and added the text in the corner.  It's a decoration/sign to identify game.

I assembled and painted a "hand" from dowel rods and wooden ovals from A.C. Moore.

Then I made some rings. I used shower rings and tied some big shiny beads to them with wire.

It will be quite a feat for anyone to actually ring a finger with these, but I figure it will occupy the menfolk for a bit.




The other game posts tomorrow!

Gram's Cookies II

Here's how they turned out! They're not exactly right, according to the family elders, but they're the best we've come up with so far.  I was skeptical of the raisin and date filling, but it's just a sweet center that tastes quite good! Family dinner is the 27th, so we only have two more weeks to figure it out...

Gram's Filled Cookies

Somehow I managed to get a recipe box that contained my grandmother's recipes. It only had a few in it-- she didn't cook much-- but the hand-writte, food-spattered index cards are pretty special.

One recipe was mentioned by my uncle on Christmas day.As you can see, it's Gram's filled cookies. Gram is my mom and uncle's grandmother, my great-grandmother. My uncle claimed these as his favorite cookies and so we're trying to decipher it before the next family supper.

The ingredients are straight-forward, but there's no description of how to assemble the cookie and filling. When Uncle Paul tried it, he ended up with something that looked like a puddle on a cookie. So I added a bit of extra flour to thicken the dough.

They're in the oven... I'll let you know!

Food ideas

Hand, Hand, Fingers, Thumb is a sing-song kind of book about monkeys playing drums. I'm thinking monkey cupcakes, found on Pinterest from here, and a drum "main cake" found on Pinterest from here (without the Elmo face, of course).