The Party!
We were really worried that Erik’s party was going to be a rain out, but the rain stopped for the first time in six days and the kids were able to squelch around in the mud, looking for creatures, moss and mushrooms. Honestly, it was better than having them all cooped up on a boat for an hour. The naturalist was even able to get the fire started, so we could have s’mores Overall, a very fun party! I’m quite glad Erik is getting more discriminating in his taste in friends. Maybe next year he can just invite a couple of boys over and have a sleepover.
Erik had big ideas about his s’mores cake and I was just the person figuring it out (with very close supervision from him). He doesn’t like chocolate cake, so I was really confused about how we would make this cake. I ended up google imaging “s’mores cake” and presented him with the possibilities. The above cake is not what he choose, exactly, but in the end it worked out great.
I didn’t want to do a layer cake because I already had a cake board and box in the 9×13 size and it seems like little kids don’t really even like cake–just frosting. I’m a fan of a layer cake with filling, but no one else ever appreciates it. I just made my go-to one bowl yellow cake recipe and added a packet of crushed graham crackers (just one sleeve of crackers from a standard Honey Maid package). We mixed in mini-Hershey’s kisses since Hershey’s chocolate tastes a lot different from Nestle chocolate. I probably would not do that again. When I turned the cake out the chocolate stuck to the pan and pretty much destroyed the cake.
I tried to make a ganache out of mini-Kisses and that was a complete fail. Erik originally wanted chocolate ganache over the cake, with pools of marshmallow cream dropped over the top. I poured the ganache in and it sunk into the cake (too much whipping cream I guess). I could have just used my not-so ganache as the chocolate component.
In the end he agreed to let me use my seven minute icing recipe for the marshmallow coating. It is so fluffy that it covered my complete disaster of a cake and no one even knew about my problems. I didn’t have a cooking torch to toast the marshmallow, but I did have a big ass lighter. It was not the best solution, but it worked. Then I just shoved in some mini-hershey bars and graham crackers and called it good.
Everyone said it tasted exactly like a s’more. It was very, very rich.
As you may have noticed from FaceBook, I was freaking out over this party on Friday afternoon. Pinterest is evil, but I ended up coming up with a solid plan. I had Mike make a decorative tent, I made some silly little signs (font: Pinewood) on cardstock and we put together a trail mix bar for the goody bag. Everyone loved the trail mix bar (except the kids didn’t actually want most of the items–they just wanted the M&Ms and pretzels) and I can see doing it as a goody bag thing again if I could figure out a way to make it fit the theme.
My friend came through in a big way and lent me all of those glass jars. She is also the one who brought the foam marshmallow/s’mores decorations. They added a really nice touch! She was incredibly helpful. She is much better at decorative details than I am.
If I had it to do over again, I would not put any nuts out with my trail mix. I know nuts are a major component of trail mix and it was fine for our party since we didn’t have any kids with nut allergies, however I had a ton of left overs. I was going to mix up some trail mix baggies to take to a party and realized I can’t do it. . . the ingredients might be cross-contaminated with peanuts. I don’t think a single kid even put any peanuts in their bag.
In the future I would have pretzels, cereal (we used generic golden grahams, but cheerios would also work, or maybe even a couple of cereals), banana chips, raisins, mini-marshmallows, and M&Ms. I would probably also put things in flat baking pans instead of upright jars. It looked cute, but the kids couldn’t scoop anything out themselves.
So that was pretty much it! Now it’s time to start planning for our Christmas advent activity calendar.