The big party was today. Now, I’m not actually a big party person, but I love the idea of having a great kids party, and especially for “special” birthdays. I’d love to give you lots of photos of everything, but….well….we got a bit caught up in the action and forgot to take photos…sorry!

Tara decided she wanted a rainbow fairy theme. She’s just started reading the Daisy Meadows fairy books (well, having them read to her) and she loved the idea of having a party with this theme. I didn’t need any further encouragement, and dismissed outright any thoughts she might have had of a tractor cake (seriously, she asked me last week if she could have a tractor cake!), or of bagels with smoked salmon and cream cheese (she’s 5 for goodness sake!).

First, the table dressing. Not being in a position to spend a heap of money on this party, I visited Spotlight (fabric store) and perused their masses of options. I found the most fabulous rainbow drill and it was half price. Now this was obviously meant to be…I didn’t even hem it, just let the selvages hang on the long side, and folded up the ends. Next, sprinkling the table with metallic sequins was fun for Tara and Briar, and I have to admit to splashing out on the fairy paper plates and napkins. For the glasses, we had plastic “baby cham” glasses (we can’t come up with a better description!) in pink, green, yellow and orange.

Food, glorious food…I’ll do recipes and the like at another stage, but here’s descriptions:

Fairy bread stars….who can go past the classic white bread (it was homemade, I promise) with butter and hundreds and thousands. Is this a worldwide phenomenon?

Fairy wands….bread sticks (yep, made them too) dipped in milk chocolate, then sprinkled with “pinkalicious” (some sugary pink stuff), edible stars and hearts and drizzled with white chocolate. Tara did mention that they really needed to have something at the end to make them look like wands, and I have to agree with her…they did kind of look like choc dipped breadsticks (or Harry Potter wands according to Adrian, but unfortunately 5 year olds don’t know about Harry)!

Fairy toadstools…rice crispie treats/honey crunch moulded into toadstool tops. Cut out a small long circle for a stalk and stick it on with chocolate. Dip the tops in chocolate and hundreds and thousands. I’ve made this recipe before and it was great. Unfortunately, I boiled the sugary mix a bit hard for a bit long so the finished product was tres brittle….not so successful but they tasted yummy.

Butterfly biscuits… these were really cute, and probably would have been a hit had I had time to get them decorated. As it was, they ended up being a back up in case there wasn’t enough food, and Adrian is enjoying snacking on them

Rainbow fairy fruit kebabs…not used to buying out of season fruit, we did get watermelon as there really wasn’t anything red in the winter fruit range. I think red grapes would have worked, but the watermelon was perfect. Mandarins, pineapple (canned so I didn’t have to cut it up), green kiwifruit and purple grapes. Now these went down a treat!

Rainbow popcorn…as hard as I looked I couldn’t find ready made and wasn’t prepared to settle for white popcorn! Made up a sugar syrup and three coloured batches gave the effect of rainbow without the hassle of making 7 batches!

Chippies…couldn’t think of a fairy name for these, but some ready salted crisps and some cheezels were the first things gone

Fairy fizz…we bought some Sprite Zero as we didn’t want the kids to be overloaded with sugar (oops, too late!), then at the table, we sprinkled in a dollop of raspberry sherbet (Emily had fun making it…and a mess….last night). It fizzes quite wonderfully and makes the drink pink. Doesn’t do too much to the flavour I have to say.

And then the cake. Sorry, Tara, I know it wasn’t a tractor cake, but it was kinda cool…and she did like the red and blue flashing wings. There was a slight technical hitch, because we hadn’t quite worked out how the wings worked. Sometimes you pushed the tummy button and you got one flash. Sometimes you got a positive light show. Just couldn’t work out how either happened, so it was a bit of a lottery at candle blowing out time. This evening, we discovered the one push is “on” and then you just have to move dolly around to get the lights to keep happening! Doh! Thankfully, when we were lighting the candles, Adrian was carrying the cake, so the wings worked perfectly!

Aaaaah…success…now onto next Saturday’s party….