Rachael's birthday party.

Birthday Ideas

I grew up with birthday parties every year. My Mom is very creative and had lots of inexpensive, easy to assemble ideas for the games, and we had homemade cake and ice cream and presents and it was all cheap and fun. I have chosen to do the same for my kids. I use the same versions of games we played and ideas from parties she did and put together fun parties for the kids. I have had good parties and disaster parties and learned a lot. I thought I would share some ideas every now and again of things that have worked for me and maybe it will inspire you in some way...

So, Rachael turned 11 a little bit ago and had a birthday party. We used a cookbook that she checked out from the library numerous times called 'Tiny Treats' (I finally bought it at Purple Cow). It has cute little treats you make, like cakes out of Oreo type cookies you stack and frost, doughnuts out of cheerios dipped in chocolate or powdered sugar and sprinkles, mini pies made from the bottom of an ice cream cone, filled with jam and an almond paste crust, and several others. The girls had fun, were self entertaining, and LOVE to cook. Most things were "put together" things and not cooking things though, so it was easy. The things involving cooking were making cinnamon rolls out of a Pillsbury biscuit rolled out with butter and cinnamon sugar and then rolled up into a cinnamon roll "tube" and sliced into mini cinnamon rolls, and crescents - made with Pillsbury crescent rolls cut into small triangles and rolled. Here are some pictures.
Kristin has on her plate doughnuts, a pie, a cake, cinnamon rolls, waffles (sugar wafers with jam) and a mini milkshake (yogurt, coolwhip, and strawberry lemonade powder)

A mini-pie.As a party favor, I found a set of plastic measuring cups and spoons at Walmart (where else?) for .97 cents and gave that to them with a small bag of candy. I knew at least their Mom's would use it. For the cake, I have mini-muffin tins that I made cupcakes with and we put a candle in one and they each had a mini- cupcake or two.