Birthday/Party Ideas

Simple B'day Menu 

Fruit Sticks

some white or red grapes

some cheddar cheese in cubes

Take a few toothpicks and place a cube of cheese and a piece of grape. The stick is ready. Simple food that kids looove!

Mini Pizzas

Base

2dl water (40 degrees)

2tsp dried yeast 

5dl flour (special flour for pizzas or all purpose flour) shifted 

a pinch of sugar 

a pinch of salt 

In a bowl mix the water with the yeast. Add the salt and sugar. Stir well. Once done start adding the flour 1dl at a time and keep knitting till all flour has been incorporated. Let it rest under a towel and in a warm place until you prepare the topping ingredients. 

Toppings

tomato puree 

grated cheese 

cherry tomatoes 

pepperoni slices

rucola (rocket) leaves 

Take the pizza base out of the bowl and roll it. Cut small round or square pizzas. Place a parchment paper on an oven dish and place the small pizzas there. Preheat your oven to 250 degrees. While you wait for the oven to reach the desired temperature prepare the toppings. Add the tomato puree on each pizza base. Start topping your pizza in this order: grated cheese, then half a cherry tomato, then a slice of pepperoni and then a rucola leaf on each pizza. 

Cook the pizzas for 15 minutes until the cheese turns golden brown. 

Enjoy!

Agent Perry B'Day Cake 

For a special 5th B'day cake, I baked my usual Strawberry Cake (Desserts section of this blog) and then used a buttercream frosting. You can find many different recipes for buttercream frosting. I always use a different one but here is one of them good recipes. 

The cake was covered with ready made fondant. I bought a plain white fondant and mixed in liquid food colors like blue, green, yellow and red. For the brown hat, I mixed red with green liquid. If you don't have green you can mix red, yellow and blue equally. 

Lightning McQueen Cake

For his 4th B'day party my son requested a McQueen cake. It was one of my first tries in making theme cakes. So, I chose to do my usual strawberry cake  filling. Now, as for the carving of the sponge and covering it, I had no ideas. After searching the internet, I collected enough information about carving a sponge cake into a car /McQueen shape to be able to confidently carve my cake. I make a few beginner's mistakes of course. I should have used a thicker frosting before I added the marzipan and I should have chilled the cake in the fridge for longer than I did. 

Most of all, I thought that my choice of marzipan was not the right one. Although it was easy to buy the different ready made colored blocks of marzipan, it did not deliver in taste. In addition, the nutty taste was not to my liking. 

Despite the few mistakes, the cake turned out pretty good. The birthday boy, along with the guests were pleasantly surprised with the result.