Monday, August 23, 2010

Somewhere over the rainbow

Well..........what a fun filled weekend we've just had in the little sweetpeas household.  Miss A is turning six next week, and months ago announced she wanted a "rainbow birthday party" - at home, with twelve of her favourite school friends to help celebrate.


Now I am far from being a party planner extraordinaire and generally do not "entertain" but, BUT as this little girl is in her first year of school, and par-tays seem to be the thing to do, I decided I could put my fear of being the hostess with the leastest aside for a day and throw her the best darn rainbow party I knew how.

I let my fingers do the walking so to speak and began perusing blogland for tips and how-to's on putting together all things rainbow.

The first gold I discovered came from a blog I follow and thoroughly enjoy, Red Gingham
Inspiration on two fronts here, rainbow jelly and rainbow marble cake.................................

I followed Julie's link to this blog and found what I thought would be a life saving recipe for a mother (ie. ME) of a child who is allergic to both egg and dairy.
 
Eager as a beaver I gave the recipe a go. 
Unfortunately I made the mistake of using the only can of softdrink in the house, which was a lemon Lift, therefore giving the cake a distinct lemony softdrinky taste. 
Hmmmmmmmmmm.  Might try the recipe again though, using just soda water. 
I do hold hopes that it may yet turn out to be a winner.



But for the sake of not looking like a complete fool to all our esteemed guests I opted to use a standard Butter Cake recipe, and then baked a batch of allergy friendly Chocolate cupcakes for Miss B to chow down on.

In my search for the perfect rainbow cake, one evening I Googled "rainbow cake" and found this
Now I knew I had hit the mother load.  It became my mission to make not a marbled rainbow cake
but a
L
A
Y
E
R
E
D
 rainbow cake!

Of course what would a rainbow party be without some sort of rainbow decorations.  With only afew nights to go before Miss A's birthday party I was browsing around blogland, hopping from one link to another then another as you do, when I came across this fabo tutorial for crochet butterflies.

 
Then and there I started up my rainbow butterfly collection and a few nights later had these to hang as decorations. 
I had to have a bit of handmade in there somewhere amongst the crepe paper streamers and coloured balloons!

Pretty, no?


Overall the party went smashingly;
my only compaint would be that I, in true slack blogger fashion, failed to take photo's of my rainbow masterpieces until after all was said and done and I was clearing up.

As I was about to disgard the only remaining, half eaten piece of six tier rainbow layer cake, it dawned on me that my hard work could not be proven in all it's glory as I had failed to capture it's beauty in digital format (which hardly does it justice anyway).


Same too goes for my fifteen cups of rainbow jelly.  Slaved over for a whole day, as two pairs of desperate eyes watched layer upon layer make their way back and forwards in and out of our fridge six times.


We did face painting, played musical statues, pin the bowtie on Cat in a Hat, we had a rainbow pinata, we blew bubbles and the favourite activity of the day would have to have been the "make your own party crown", which went over extremely well with both children and adults alike. 
Deep down I think we all enjoy a good bit of crafting, don't you?

So I hope you enjoyed it Miss A because it won't be repeated for a very. long. time.....................


A big thank you has to go out to all the wonderful, creative and inspirational bloggers, who freely share their ideas and knowledge.
CHEERS!

6 comments:

  1. Well done, Fran! What a dedicated mummy you are. Your daughter is blessed to have you as her mum. Jane

    ReplyDelete
  2. What a lucky little girl!
    Happy 6th Birthday!
    Looks like you pulled out all the stops Fran.
    The cake looks fantastic and I LOOOVE those crochet butterflies. Are they hard to make?
    And How are you?
    Kram Julie x

    ReplyDelete
  3. I stumbled across that cake link just last night as I was hunting down ideas for Lotties party this Friday!
    Your version looks fabulous. And the rest of the party looks pretty amazing too. I love the rainbow jelly.

    ReplyDelete
  4. Wow, what a fantastic party! That cake looks fabulous and I am so impressed by all the decorations. It looks like Aimee had a fantastic party and will have lots of happy memories of it.

    ReplyDelete
  5. oh what a fine display!
    i enjoy the rather dee-lite-ful pictures your splendid blog!
    keep up the wonderful posts!
    golly!

    ReplyDelete
  6. You really are a wonderful mum, bravo and well done on producing such fabulous rainbow-themed ideas! Love your blog.

    ReplyDelete

Thanks for reading and sharing your thoughts, you've just made my day!