My girl's birthday party

First off, let me say how proud I am of the fact that you could walk into my house on any given night and say," Well, well, well. What have we here?" and at least three of us would say, "Santa Claus? Ha! Ooooohhhh I'm really scared!"

My girl loves The Nightmare Before Christmas. She insists that she is Jack, the Pumpkin King. Love it. So I went a bit overboard for her birthday party this year.

Here is her cake. It is the result of tons of experimenting. I made some cakes that totally rocked. {see below}

This one has royal icing on the top, the face is made with melted chocolate. Not perfect, but I think I could have improved it with another try. The kids refused to eat the icing, so this cake was a no go.

Here is my attempt at cupcakes. Not a great icing job, but I didn't have the proper tools to dispense it. It didn't matter - my kids won't eat buttercream (sugar and butter kids! craziness) and my son wouldn't touch the cake because I colored it purple. It weirded him out. I loved the painted marshmallow and used the technique elsewhere.

So after all the fuss, I wound up using a box cake (enhanced a bit) and store bought icing because it is all I could get the kiddos to eat! I think it looks pretty good. A little Jackson Pollock-ish, but cute. I made the little card on top and found some really cool black and white candles. She was ecstatic and the cake was good, I guess that is all that matters.

Here are my goodie bags that I am so proud of:


I used black food coloring to paint a Jack face on a sugar cookie pre-baked, then sprinkled it with sugar and baked. (Here is the recipe. Alton Brown of course!) I think they looked great! I can't wait to paint some holiday cookies. The white thing underneath the crayons is a hand made, Nightmare Before Christmas coloring book. I found some download-able coloring pages online and created the little book. (Note on copyrights: I don't mean to challenge any copyrights here, but Disney, some of us still love this movie and we sure would love a bit more merchansie geared to our kids!)

Here is the little sugar cookies I made for the party:

A good time was had by all.

Moral of this blog post: Get some paintbrushes and a nice set of food colors - painting cookies is a lot of fun!

Here is Oggie Boogie's song from Nightmare. It is really a toss up for me between this song and "What's this?" for best song from this film.