How Not To Do Orange Segment Rainbow Jelly

This is what was meant to have been served up at Darling Daughters Care Bear Rainbow 3rd Birthday party;

Looks pretty cool what could go wrong?

Oh yeah I could get involved! Ignoramous moi!



To see how to do it properly click here.

How to avoid being a dick (sorry for naughty word but best descrption) like me and making a hash of it!

• Expect waste. Leftover jelly, dudd orange shells, off cuts from the finished product.
• Give yourself plenty of time to let the jellies set. If I just did the original plan the jelly would have set better and I would have been able to do each colour one after the other and just chuck out the spare jelly. I do not like food waste so I decided (way too late) to do a big bowl of rainbow jelly to use up the spare jelly. This meant that I had to do one colour at a time allowing each one to set before doing the next one. I was setting an alarm to make the next colour so I would finish all the colours in time for the party. I actually had to get up in the middle of the night (see told you dick) to fit them all in.
• Use an electric device to hollow out the oranges like I did but don't go crazy and hollow out too much. I was trying to get all the orange out so I was left with a white shell to get best background for the coloured jelly to show up on (so anal, so very, very anal). I ended up with a hole in the first one. If I looked at the picture of the good ones closer I would have seen that they have some orange left in.
• Buy extra oranges so you can make a few mistakes.
• DON'T use the freezer to speed up setting of jelly. I googled it and found mixed reviews. I can tell you it doesn't work!
• Use a sharp knife when cutting the jelly filled orange, obvious I know but just saying!
• Make sure you have an appropriate dish to serve. I had to use two (of the dishes my friend lent me) dishes. I actually ditched one of the colours because it was such a mess. Just as well really as I didn't have the room!

I probably set my expectations a bit high! Especially as I had never even made jelly before let alone practiced the dish and was really underprepared! Regardless my guests were impressed. Hopefully genuinley impressed!

I originally got the idea from this awesome facebook page Mama's Style, check it out, some cool ideas.

Posted with Blogsy

Care Bear/Rainbow Cupcakes

Here we have lovely rainbow cupcakes that I whipped up as an after thought on the morning of THE party!

Yeah right!

I saw them and thought 'I wish I could make these but I sense a disaster waiting to happen'. I cant even manage the cupcakes you make from a box.

Luckily for me I have a Lil' Sis' in the house! I was showing her what I was going to make and what I wished I could make and she volunteered to make these babies! Yes she has her uses my Lil' Sis'!!

She used a yummy lemon loaf recipe she learned while cooking for the old folks at her work! Then decorated them as shown. Not difficult really I suppose but anything past just icing and my brain doesn't compute how to tackle it!

Clever Aunty Katy.

Except you may notice the icing is not quite the right color ... Perhaps better for a Smurf theme!! Not so clever Katy thought the food colouring would have a dropper but it's actually a pourer so she got a whole lot more colour than she bargained for!

The rainbow belts were a wee bit droopy too but I'm not sure how to fix that. As a wee added extra we popped a gummy bear on top to fit the Care Bear theme, I didn't get a very good picture of that though, we did that last minute and as soon as they were served they were woofed down.

They were so tasty, blue icing and lemon cake make an awesome combination! With my sisters permission I will blog about the cake recipe at a later date!

Posted with Blogsy

Oreo Pops

I saw these ... 

 

on the MamasStyle Facebook page and thought 'ooooh these look like a cute, EASY, addition to the menu for Darling Daughters Rainbow Care Bear party'.

Silly me!

Ok I just went by the pictures, I didn't look up any instructions. But come on how hard could it be just get some Oreos, lolly sticks, sprinkles and melted chocolate and put it all together.

No, no, no.

The first step of putting the lolly sticks into the middle of the biscuit sandwiches resulted in not only splitting the sandwich apart but breaking the biscuits too.

I wasn't amused to say the least but I managed to salvage the situation.

I rescued the Oreos that had just split in half and still had in fact biscuits. I laid them on some grease proof paper and used the melted chocolate as glue and poured it over them sticking the sandwich back together with the lolly stick inbetween! I poured over the sprinkles, let it dry, turned them over and did the same to the other side.

I ended up with six cookies stuck together with chocolate and six lolly sticks sticking out. It didn't look great but I just used a sharp knife to cut them apart!

 

The method wasn't quite what I imagined but they looked pretty cool. Lovely Hubby was very excited by them and insisted I save one for him!!! The kids quite liked them too but I don't think anybody (except LovelyHubby) managed a whole one!

I just poped them in a pint glass weigheddown with left over pebbles and M&Ms...ta da ... My effort ...

 

 

 

Posted with Blogsy

Decorated Marshmallows Dipped in Chocolate.

Now these were my own idea for the Care Bear Rainbow party them.

Genius I know ... ok not at all genius.

BUT ... I was able to fit them to the theme, they were the least stressful thing to make (except maybe the fairy bread), they looked cool set out pretty on the nice white plates (thank you Superfitmummy) AND they were tasty.

What more could you want.

I admit I have never actually made these before and I stupidly assumed it would be easy. Compared to some of the other things we made for the party this was one off the easiest and with the sprinkles and pebbles (smarties) on top ...

Here you have it some, oh so easy to match to a theme, marshmallows dipped in chocolate ...

With pebbles on top ...

I DO HOPE YOU NOTICED THE RAINBOW ACCURACY OF THE PEBBLE MARSHMALLOWS.

After googling and checking with Mother Dearest I was chanting ...

RICHARD OF YORK GREAT/GAINED BATTLE IN VAIN

Granted I had to improvise a bit with the colors but I got the gist of it right.

And with rainbow hundreds and thousands on top ...

Simple but effective!

Posted with Blogsy

3rd Birthday Party Notsosuperscottishmummy Style Part 1

I am known to stress...in fact I earned the lovely nickname Stresshead Simpson in one jolly workplace! If there is something to stress about I'll find it. In fact if I find myself not stressing I stress because that can't be right and I must be something however small that I should be stressing about. Sure in enough, if I stop and think I find it lurking at the back of my brain.

Imagine my delight at the prospect of organizing Darling Daughters 3rd Birthday Party. I really wanted her and her friends to have an awesome time but not at the expense of my sanity!

Luckily for me I found a lovely page on Facebook called Mama's Style just before I started my panic about what to do for Darling Daughters 3rd birthday. Mama's Style is full of awesome finds for loads of things for kids and Mummies. The lovely Mama's Style lady has since set up a lovely blog of her own, it has cool ideas, finds and just stuff it's great, go see for yourself...at www.mamasstyle.com.

Anyhoo it was here that I found some great ideas for The Party.

I wanted something simple but fun. I had a look through The Mama's Style pictures and found some great ideas but the one that seemed to have the simplest things to make was the rainbow theme. My only worry here was that Darling Daughters wee friend had a rainbow party earlier in the year and I was worried her Mummy might think I was copying but I wasn't. And besides I was doing different things as she did. Her mummy happens to be Superfitmummy who is a good chum so even if she thought I was copying (which I wasn't) she wouldn't mind.

I also wanted to have some great decorations to make it special for Darling Daughter and again with the help of Mama's Style I found a great website called www.mummyslittlehelper.co.nz. Full of great ideas and supplies for kids parties. I ordered them on Friday and they arrived on Monday....how awesome is that? I was super impressed.

I would love to have done a dinosaur party, fairy party, sesame street party, toy story party, smurf party...the list is endless but decorations aside food ideas for any of the other options might have been tricky for the likes of me.

So imagine my delight when I found Care Bear stuff. Yippee skippe. I fricking loved The Care Bears when I was a nipper and as luck would have it Darling Daughter loves them too. Granted the new style Care Bears aren't as cute as the old style ones but The Care Bear them and rainbow theme go well together and The Care Bear stuff looked lovely and colorful and wasn't going to break the bank. I wanted the whole Care Bear thing to be a surprise but I wanted to make sure Darling Daughter approved so I checked with her and she was super stoked with the idea.

I'm the kind of person who likes/needs to have everything matching, some may call it OCD! I struggled not to blow the budget on getting every little thing I could find that was Care Bear related. I managed to ration myself to a tablecloth, banner, cups, plates, napkins, masks and blowers. Your probably wondering what else was available seeing as that actually seems a lot but there was two sizes of plates, cups and napkins, straws, party bags, notebooks, table decoration.....the list goes on. The only thing I would have liked to get that I couldn't find was a Care Bear teddy. Lovely Hubby would also have liked it if we could find Care Bear costumes for either her or us. That would have been cute! Oh yeah I also liked the idea of putting up a Care Bear Poster and getting the kids in there masks to stand next to it and have there photo taken but I couldn't find a poster in time.

Back to the food. I picked things that looked simple to do and fitted the theme in the hope that as they were simple they would look as good as the web pictures I found them on. But surprise surprise with me at the helm nothing really turned out as it should have EXCEPT the marshmallows dipped in chocolate. My own idea and hardly difficult but they looked cool. Even the rainbow cloud cupcakes my Little Sister made suffered due to my input but they tasted awesome.

I'll share some of our failures and triumphs in the next few blogs.

......

To be continued

Posted with Blogsy