Party prep

It's hard to believe that five years have almost passed since miss Mallory made her entrance to the world (a full two weeks late - forgiven but not forgotten.) This year, for the first time since her first birthday, we decided to do individual parties for Liam and Mallory. With both of them in school their bases of friends have just changed too much to try to get everyone under one roof. Mallory decided that she wanted a rainbow party... though I will admit this may have been spurred on a bit by me bookmarking all kinds of cool ideas on Pinterest and showing them to her. Come on in... we are ready to party!
The wreath on the door was a fun project that Mallory and I made together. Liam even got in on the action. We used 250 balloons and there are a few spots that could have used even more. I don't think latex balloons have a super long shelf life, but I am putting this away and hoping to be able to pull it out for future birthday parties, even if they aren't rainbow themed. I guess it's also worth pointing out/admitting at this point that the concept of 'rainbow' was expanded to include 'all things colourful'. There were not that many actual rainbows at the party. The dining room, set up for our guests the day before the party. I originally was going to swag the ceiling with different colours of plastic tablecloths, but after getting a few up, I didn't think it looked very good and also realized the colour casts would really interfere with picture taking. They came back down and the mobiles went up in their place. It's hard to tell from the pictures how cool the mobiles were - they really added to the room. There were four in all, one at each corner of the table. Loot bags lined up and ready to go on the sideboard. And what was in them, you may ask?
Well... rainbow stuff, obviously! Skittles (taste the rainbow!), a rainbow swirl lollipop, stickers, a pencil that writes in different colours simultaneously, and rainbow modelling clay.
Here's a shot of the kitchen the day before the party - it was a disaster. And what, you may wonder, made that much mess?
OK, I will admit the cakes-in-a-jar turned out pretty cute. But I don't reallly recommend them. I wanted to make one of those tall layer cakes that are all over the blogosphere right now - the ones with plain white icing and when you cut into them, each layer is a different colour. But Mallory refused. She saw these and wanted them, so I agreed to it. Well, I don't know how the people posting pictures of these beautiful jar cakes all over the internet are doing it. First, it took a lot of trial and error to get the right amount of batter into the right size of jar, trying to account for how much it's going to expand when baked. Then, ours browned quite a bit on the outside which made the cake lose its pretty vibrant hue. Judging by the center of the cake though I think it's fair to say we used enough food colour:
(The cakes dome up when you bake them, so you scoop that off and then apply the icing.) The one in the photo here is not too bad but it was definitely the best of the batch. Then, there is the issue of how you eat it. The first few mouthfuls are nothing but icing, followed by nothing but cake. Mallory took two bites of hers and proclaimed that she did not like it. I scraped the icing aside to allow her to get to the cake, but she was already over it. All that work and then she didn't like it! I should have made the layer cake after all. On the bright side, I would like to think this is proof that she likes my homemade cake and icing better than the mix and canned frosting I used here - because I spent enough time tinkering with food colouring and layering batter in jars and baking in a water bath and washing every bowl in the house - I was not about to add to that work by making the cake from scratch, too.

Up next: scenes from a party. At least a few... I am always glad to take these photos during the prep stage of a party, because the actual event goes by in a flash and I never have enough time to pick the camera up.