Party Time

Boston is decorating his "volcano" cookie. It was a little girl's "shift dress", but definitely looks like a volcano from his perspective

Today we celebrated Mackenzie's birthday. It was a fun fun party. Only four children came, but when joined with our four, any amount becomes big quickly! We had a baking party and I think it may have been the best party yet.

Mackenzie got face paint for her birthday on Thursday and she has been practicing on everyone's face (or whatever body part had no clothing), so she painted faces. She was supposed to paint cupcakes, but the two girls I inspected looked like they had cat faces. Not sure what that has to do with baking, but it was fun. We made chef's hats (just take two pieces of legal paper, tape them together longways, have kids color them, then fold them like an accordian, unfold them, fold up the bottom of the paper and write chef kid on the front, wrap it around kids head, and BOOM, instant chef. Oh yeah, staple or tape it to fit correctly). Those were cute.

My gracious mother in law made 100 sugar cookies pre-party and so I just had to provide colored sugar and icing for the cookies. There is an amish place close by here that sells colored sugars in every pretty color for $1.50 a "tub". The icing is powdered sugar and water. So, I set up that "station" with kids chairs and icing in little cups with plastic knives and then the colored sugars.

Another "baking station" was the pizza making table. Last night, I whipped up some pizza dough, made small balls out of it, and refrigerated it. This morning, I got the dough out first thing and let it rise. In the meantime, I put toppings in tiny little ramekins from the restaurant supply store (23 cents each). I did onions, bell pepper, olives, artichokes, pepperoni, and then cheese and sauce. I covered our kitchen table with a plastic tablecloth and put flour in a salt shaker type deal. Every child got a child's sized rolling pin (www.growingcooks.com) and rolled out their own dough, put the sauce (ragu) on top, cheese, and any toppings. I had made 24 balls of dough so the parents got to make their own pizzas as well. This was really a LOT of fun and the dough turned out just right. Oh yeah, after the kids rolled their dough into a circle (or whatever), they put this on a piece of parchment paper and I wrote their name on the paper (with a pencil). THEN, they topped the pizza. This worked beautifully. I have a double oven with 3 racks in each oven, so we just popped 3 pizzas in and set one timer, then 3 more and set another. The pizza turned out SO SO well and everyone was fed by the end of the party. The dough can be frozen or refrigerated for three days, so we will make more pizza on monday for lunch leftovers. The kids took home their rolling pins as a party favor.

Finally, I had a "feel and touch" station with different cups of ingredients that go into pizza. The kids were to close their eyes and feel the items (garlic, onion, flour, oil, rosemary...), but we just ran out of time. Megan did the feel and touch and I wish I had video taped it....so funny!

I got the pizza dough recipe from this site: http://www.101cookbooks.com/archives/001199.html

The article is called "The Best Pizza Dough Ever Recipe"

All in all, a very inexpensive and fun party. Would love to do this again any time.