Astrid's first birthday - part #1!

The theme for Astrid's party was birds and owls. Her nursery is decorated in a bird and owl theme and I thought I'd continue it for her first birthday party. We went with a colour theme of red, pink and white.

The food: since we are unable to do anything simply in this household the food had to match the theme. For the savoury options we had:
* Home made mini quiches with bacon & cheddar and caramelised onion, mushroom & brie.
* Mini frankfurts (these were for the kids but the adults stole most of them).
* Mini pizzas - ham & pineapple and mushroom, onion & capsicum. We made some of the pizzas as mini bird shapes and they were a hit with the kids (and the babies it seems).
* Mini sausage rolls (again, I think the adults mostly stole these off the kids).
* Trays and trays of sandwiches. Yes, Lorraine does not follow instructions and 2 trays of sandwiches turned into about 6!!The hot food disappeared into hungry bellies and even a fair percentage of the sandwiches got demolished. I noticed several kids running around covered in tomato sauce and pizza topping :)

The sweets were mostly bird and owl themed. We had:
* cookies & cream cupcakes with oreo owl faces (note to self: these look cute but it took 4 of us about an hour and a half to decorate 24 of them!). It is also not possible to neatly split about a million oreos for the faces without a lot of wastage and swearing. Lucky they looked cute.
* choc-owl cake pops. These should have come with a warning about how much sugar they contained. Sugar stuck together by some sugar, covered in sugar and chocolate! Annoying and fiddly to make but they looked cute.
* Mini lemon & white chocolate baked cheesecakes with fondant birds on top. These were pretty easy to make and tasted fairly yum.
* Bird and Owl sugar cookies with pink glaze. Just when you need more sugar and food colouring, out come the cookies!
* Choc-peanut birds 'nests' with spotted eggs. These were cute and yes I did spend hours sifting through the jelly bean jar to pick all the red, white and pink jelly beans out to make the eggs.
* Pink and white marshmallows (for the kids that hadn't had enough sugar).
* Oh yeah, there was some fruit too.....


The cake: I had made some stuffed owls to go with Astrid's nursery. I had made the pattern from scratch and used fabric for her nursery theme and stuffed them with our alpaca fleece. I decided to make a cake version for her first birthday cake. Mr owl looked pretty cute and even resembled the stuffed versions! Anto did very well with his fondant application. However, I clearly didn't think through the concept of red fondant, a bunch of kids and babies and white furniture though. Oh well, they had fun! Astrid managed to eat most of her piece riding on Grandpa's shoulders which resulted in him wearing red fondant.


The decorations: Red, pink and white pom poms were the main decoration (those suckers take ages to fluff) and we just colour coordinated with red and pink napkins and red cups and plates. We stuck pink 'flying birds' up on the glass around the dining room and these were fascinating for the kids to poke. All the food was served on white platters. The kids (and some of the big kids) took home their weekly sugar provisions in white take away boxes with the bird themed labels.


The birthday girl's outfit: A red fluffy skirt, a birdie top and matching tights. She was very cute and loved prancing around in her skirt.