Prior to the festivities we made personalized aprons and decked the place out in cooking utensils. Upon their arrival they decorated their chef hats and their goody bags.
Because it was a chef party, they made their own pizzas (with Karen's fabulous homemade dough, of course!), mixed up cookies to later decorate, and made coffee ice cream.
Once the ice cream was mixed, it was time to freeze. We put it in an ice cream ball: it has two chambers, an outer one for ice and salt, and an inner one for the creamy yumminess. Then you roll the ball around for 20 minutes to freeze it. We played cold potato to make the mixing time seem a little shorter.
When the cookies had cooled, they had to be decorated. Each kid had an individual king size cookie; we did these in lieu of a cake.
Hannah F wanted her cookie au naturale.
With all that sugar, sometimes you need to get out some energy.
Big fun, good food, lots of laughs, great friends!
Since my birthday is on the 24th, we combined our family celebration on Jenna's actual day. Both of us wanted this delicious made-from-scratch chocolate cake. Unfortunately there was a mishap during the baking process -- it grew out of the pan and started spilling over into the oven. And this occurred while Karen was picking up Jenna from school, leaving Anya and Emily to deal with this unexpected catastrophe. And while neither I nor Karen were here to witness this event, I feel quite confident that had someone surreptitiously videoed the goings-on, it would be viral on YouTube by now. Karen was on the phone and able to get an audio play-by-play. First, the frantic call from Anya that the cake has overflowed the pan -- what do we do?! Her's and Emily's marked fear of putting their hands inside the oven to clean out the spilled batter (now burning on the bottom of the oven) and shrieks of shock (no actual burning of flesh) at the nearness of the heat to their skin -- it's so hot! It's scary! -- then the cries of confusion and frustration when the smoke alarm begins to go off -- Make it stop! How do we make it stop?! -- the lamentations that they just can't do this, please get home quickly, and WHAT DO WE DO WITH THE REST OF THE CAKE STILL IN THE PAN?!?!?!
Whew.
They managed to clean it up and put the remaining cake batter back into the oven for another 20 minutes of baking. But as you can imagine, a cake that has to be taken from it's cooking home for 15 minutes and then returned to that heated environment doesn't come out flawlessly.
On the plus side, it did bake through, and tasted fabulous.
On the minus side, it looked like this
after being dumped/scooped from it's baking pan.But, honestly, we've had the cake the "normal" way numerous times, looking all perky and chocolate-shiny-luminous. This way made for a much more memorable birthday. Normal is w-a-y overrated.
We spent the family birthday celebration night playing Monopoly. Karen found a vintage one at a garage sale for $2, and I don't think it had ever been played. The money was still so crisp the bills kind of stuck together the first time we played it.
In the end, neither of the birthday peeps was the winner. Anya was the property tycoon of the night.
But we all enjoyed the cake.
3 comments:
Ah, Monopoly, the evilest game on earth
Fun! They had such a good time :)
I love monopoly but haven't played it in years! I should pick up a game and challenge my husband to a match!
The party looked great. Loved the idea of the baker hats!!
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