This week I have many pieces to the major piece I orchestrated on Sunday! It was my daughters 6th birthday party and the theme for the day was a cat birthday tea party. So I gathered lots of afternoon tea goodies such as madeleines, ginger snaps, chips, crackers and cheese, salsa and chips (as we are in California after all!) and an apple juice substitute for the tea. I did not think that actual tea would go down too well with 6 year olds.

The week started with baking the 4 cakes I used for the cat cake. It was a whole wheat chocolate, cherry pound cake. I have used it many times for birthdays from the King Arthur Flour Whole Wheat Baking book. And for the center of the double layer cake, I made a white chocolate ganache and I iced the cake with vienna cream. While the cake was baking I made yarn balloons as Holly had wanted these as decorations. I read a couple of tutorials on them and the best one was this. I made 9 of them and only 3 were a success, to me that is a craft fail – they take a long time to make and they are really messy this is all fine but the consistency of the glue and the water and the strength of the balloons plus the yarn all make a difference to the final product. I don’t think I will be doing that one again – yikes I put them on the tree outside and they are out hanging in the rain at the moment, not good at all (they are now piles of hanging yarn!) I really think they will make great centerpiece decos if I plan to use my yarn that way again?!?

The Cat Cake from my favorite cake book – The Australian Women’s Weekly Children’s Birthday Cake Book

Yarn balls in theme with a cat tea party but a complete craft fail, boo hoo!

Then it was onto getting the planning done for the crafts and Missy wanted crowns and masks. The idea was to wear them while we are having tea and cake. The crowns were a stained glass crown design from the Artful Parent and we die cut hearts out of magazines with a heart punch and had metallic markers for the stained glass with jewels for added decoration. The masks were easy though I had to thread the elastic on each of them and it was up to the kids to use the metallic pens to decorate them how they liked. All the girls and my son had a fun time with the masks on running around the park and being super heroes and such! Here is my pinterest board of the ideas we had for the cat party!

The Superhero – Mr Ash!

Coloring in action!

Mask in progress

The story of the teacups was a last minute decision and I was hoping for the hunt for lovely china cups but then I thought well they may break on a concrete floor with a bunch of 6 year olds mucking about at the park. In the end I found these mid century melamine tea cups on ebay and thought just perfect – they will also come in handy for picnics and are fancy for drinking wine over the summer!

The table and teacups ready for crafting and some tea and cake

The birthday girl blows out her candles – or tries to!