This week O turned into a big four year old girl. So of course we have been celebrating since the anniversary of her birth until her birthday party over the weekend. She calls her self the unicorn keeper, so it was only fitting that she should have a unicorn themed party.
Here she is. She was so happy to celebrate her birthday with her friends, who she hand picked to invite. Usually we invite all our friends but this year it was just a couple of little girls that she wanted to invite with their families, as well her cousins. For me it was also nice to have time with a few guests so that we could talk in a group, rather then having 10 minutes with each person. The little ones also played really nicely and had a blast together.
For the last few years I have been buying O’s cakes, but this year she asked her aunty to make her a unicorn cake. Didn’t she do such an amazing job! She always makes beautiful cakes for her kids, but I was blown away by this one. I believe it was buttercream on the outside with some fondont for the eats and eyes. The horn is actually an icecream cone with fondant wrapped around it. Inside it was a Serbian layered cake with layers of sponge, made of almond meal and plasma biscuits and custard made with Milka chocolate. What I loved about it was that it wasn’t too sweet, which is what I usually find with Serbian cakes.
I made two sweet treats, cupcakes and shortbread cookies with sprinkles. I forgot to photograph my cookies, but you may seem them in the background of one of the other photos. They were just a basic shortbread biscuit, made of butter, brown sugar, flour and vanilla and I stired through some coloured sprinkles. I used Hooper 100’s and 1000s, since I wanted something free of artifical colours, flavours and preservatives.
As for the cupcakes I used Chloe Coscarelli’s recipe for Dark Chocolate Fudge Cake (vegan). I also added some vegan chocolate chips and blueberries. This recipe was a little naughty because it had coffee, but it was so lovely and fudgey. For the frosting, I made a basic butter cream recipe with butter, icing sugar and soy milk. This year I decided to use organic butter because I am sick of using Nutlex and having the oil separate from the frosting. I usually like to make everything dairy free but I think the butter tasted better, looked better and lasted better.For the colours I used Queen Rainbow Natural Extracts and Hooper Pink Sprinkles. I made a couple of batches of the frosting so that I could pipe both colours at the same time. I am not really happy that I couldn’t manage to get purple or orange with the Queen’s food colouring. This orangy-flesh colour was not exactly what I was after but it was ok with the pink.
Now for the savoury food. My mum made this amazing grazing table. It had Proscuitto di Parma, nitrate-free hot salami, crackers, olives, brie, gerkins, sundried tomatoes, dates, nuts, grapes and pears. I served made my Fried Zucchini (see my recipe), which were a hit. I also made homemade pork sausage rolls with nitrate-free free-range pork sausages and I used both normal and gluten free puff pastry. I did have a little hitch with the Simply Wize gluten free pastry sheets.They initially cracked when I tried to wrap the sausages, so I did need to re-knead and roll out out the dough with some arrowroot flour. Once I did that they were perfect for pastry use. Since I had left mine in the over a little long to keep warm my normal puff pastry did split, but the gluten free remained perfect and there was little difference with the taste, it was just a little less flakey. The last thing I served was a homemade lasenge; cherry tomatoes for the kids and salad of Rocket, cherry tomatoes and avocado. The Lasanga turned out great, except that I left it on warm in the over and it blackened the top a little. Everyone said it still tasted great and thank goodness it didn’t taste burned.
I also organised a little Dress-up Station for the girls. That wasn’t really used, but everyone. They did enjoy the games that I organised. We played Pass-the-Parcel and Musical Chairs. My daughter knew what the prizes were and was very competitive. She actually won both games. I let her keep the prize from Pass-the-Parcel, but for the Musical Chairs the second winner got the prize. I also made the girls some little gift bags, that had fairy wands, sparkely unicorn stickers, unicorn animal erasers and some of my Shortbread cookies.
Oh the last thing I will show you is the picture I coloured for O’s birthday. This is from Dromenvanger by Tomislav Tomic. I intend doing my next review on this book, as I am currently working in it. She was pretty happy with it, since it featured one of her favourite creatures.
I hope you liked O’s unicorn party. If you are wanting to find the same decorations you can find the Unicorn themed banner, table cloth and candles from Big W’s party section. The rest of the unicorns come from the collection of my little unicorn keeper.
If you want to see what I did for O’s parties in the past few years see these posts below:
Live Eat Colour 