Cookie Decorating

Royal Icing decorated cookies

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For The Girl's birthday celebration with family and her closest little friends we decided on a bug theme. Kind of ironic given her fear of real live bugs, but she was really excited about "Ladybugs. Bees. Butterflies. Dragonflies."

A Bug Birthday Party If you've met Pinterest, you know it's full of a ridiculous amount of inspiration for parties. I had a party to do "wish" list and just eliminated things from my list as my priorities became clear. My biggest priority was to be able to enjoy the party myself. There just isn't time for everything. I tried to incorporate our theme in little ways throughout the party. And I made new outfits for The Girl and The Boy (to be featured in a future post).

Decorations

Leading up to the party I did some bug related crafts with my kids to use as inspiration at our party craft table and to use as decorations. I also realized that we had a butterfly kite in the garage. Perfect!

butterfly artbutterfly kite on a wreath hanger

I bought a set of bug masks, but there was only one package in stock, so I didn't have enough for party favor bags. I decided to just put them out for whoever was interested. At some point, The Boy was walking around distributing them to whomever was nearby. When kids were wanting masks later in the party I just sent them to The Boy so he could locate a mask for them. It worked great. My mom found these cute little solar doo-dads at the Dollartree. There was one with ladybugs and one with bees. The flowers and bugs bop around if they are in the sun.

table decor

Food

After my husband spent the whole party on the grill for The Boy's 2nd birthday party, we decided that food needed to be easier and allow us more time with our guests. Also, so many of those adorable Pinterest ideas are... well... not the healthiest options. We catered the lunch with Chipotle (a big hit with the guests and so easy!) and got a couple Baskin Robbins' ice cream cakes for dessert. No picture, but the silverware was in small flower pots.

big ice cream cakecakes (lady bug cake!)

I made a fruit salad (well, Uncle Jeff did all the work!).

fruit salad with butterflu watermelon

And of course I couldn't pass up a reason to make sugar cookies. Since it was a birthday party with cake I made little cookies. These are about 1 to 1.5" bite size cookies. The ladybugs were made on parchment paper and then attached to the flowers. (Same technique I used on my fire trucks, but less fragile.) The butterflies were all decorated wet-on-wet after first piping on the bodies.

cookiesbug and flower cookies 2bug and flower cookies 4

Activities

With 15 kids coming between the ages of 6 months and 7 years old I think it's important to have options for the different ages, but not to schedule them through the party. There were no games. There were no prizes. Just activities for people to do (or not) and party favor bags for the kiddos on the way out.

We recently got a soccer goal that my kids are loving, so I had that out for the party. The basketball hoop was out as well. We moved our art table outside with some how to draw bugs directions and supplies to "Build a Bug". Kids had tubes, cardboard, construction paper, drawing paper, pipe cleaners, fabric, googly eyes, markers, colored pencils (no crayons for a backyard party in 85 degree heat!), dot markers, glue sticks and colored tape. My husband weeded the area against the back of the house that would be mostly in the shade for the duration of the party so we could setup the art table in the shade. I wish I had pictures of the creations to share.

build-a-bug tableWe also had sidewalk chalk and bubbles, cause FUN. Sidewalk chalk was a big hit judging by the amount of art on our patio. Auntie Jenn drew these to get the party started.

sidewalk chalksidewalk chalk

Party Favors

I got red and yellow bags and used some black cardstock to decorate them to look like ladybugs and bees. Once I had settled on the bug theme, I knew I had to get Nano Hexbugs for the kids. We'd received one a couple years ago as a party favor and it was so fun... and perfect for our theme! Ordering batteries in bulk online meant I could include a couple spare batteries as well (so favor bags were delivered with an "I gave your kids batteries" warning). I rounded out the bags with bubbles, insect stamps, and bug and flower stickers.

favor bagsparty favors

The Outfits

Update: You can see photos of the party outfits I made for the kids here. The preview of The Girl's top in progress can be seen here.

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This week is full of party preparations for The Girl's 2nd birthday party on Sunday. Today's task is to decorate the cookies. It's been a while since my last batch of cookies at the beginning of April (that I'm not sure I posted) so I was quite pleased this morning when coloring the icing came together faster than normal. I think the secret was to start out with a batch of icing that wasn't so thick -- it wasn't SO HARD to stir when adding color and it didn't take as much thinning after it was colored. I made piping icing and thinned down to about 10-second icing for my flood icing.

icing mixed and ready to go

0 down, 129 to go...

129 cookies

Here's part of my inspiration for this set:

tiny ladybug

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fire trucks with laddersThese may be the second most detailed cookies I've made (second to Rapunzel). I'm mostly happy with them. I think my biggest problem was in not flooding full enough so they caved in a little as they dried. Oh, and that dent from my finger (oops!) on the cab of the bottom truck. Oh, AND how I forgot that I had made regular truck cookies and had it all in my head that I'd baked fire trucks. So yeah, you can totally make a fire truck from your REGULAR truck cutter as well. ;-)

All my icing is flood consistency, 18-20 second icing. I didn't pipe around the borders, but you could. Here's how I did it.

Make white windows on the cab of the truck.
Make white windows on the cab of the truck.
Make black tires.
Make black tires.
Fill the tires with white. (Since it's wet-on-wet you can fill enough to connect to the black.)
Fill the tires with white. (Since it's wet-on-wet you can fill enough to connect to the black.)
Make grey along the bottom edge... I wasn't thrilled with how this came out, I came a little too close to the wheels in some cases -- I think I'd pipe a border for this part before flooding next time.)
Make grey along the bottom edge... I wasn't thrilled with how this came out, I came a little too close to the wheels in some cases -- I think I'd pipe a border for this part before flooding next time.)
Floor red for the body of the truck, getting nice and close to fill in up against the windows (that have hardened up a bit by now).
Flood red for the body of the truck, getting nice and close to fill in up against the windows (that have hardened up a bit by now).
Make ladders on parchment paper or wax paper and allow them to dry overnight.
Make ladders on parchment paper or wax paper and allow them to dry overnight.
Peel a ladder carefully off of the wax/parchment paper.
Peel a ladder carefully off of the wax/parchment paper.
Attach ladders to trucks with a few tiny dots of icing.
Attach ladders to trucks with a few tiny dots of icing.

Note, I highly suggest that you don't transport these with the ladders attached. I broke a ladder putting them in the box.