Birthday Party Recap...Recipe and tips included

Kristianna in the Orange Sweatshirt

My girls love to have birthday parties. I love to throw them birthday parties, but sometimes I just get burnt out. One has a birthday in November and the other in March. Not much time in between. A few years ago I began just doing sleepover birthday parties every other year. On the years they do a sleepover they only invite a few friends (usually 5 max). Our house just isn't quite big enough yet for more than that.

Last weekend was Kristianna's birthday party. Will someone please remind me NOT to have a sleepover party the night we move our clocks ahead. Can we say serious LACK of sleep! Not smart on this mama's part. BUT it was fun. 

The girls hung pictures of her when she was little from the streamers. Such a fun idea.

When it comes to the girls parties, they love to start early enough to really have fun and do some activities outside (remember when their birthdays are...darkness comes quick), so we usually include dinner in with the party. Something easy, not too expensive and something of their choosing. Typical requests are Sloppy Joes, Pizza, Tacos. If the party is really small it might be ribs or burgers. This year it was homemade pizza with homemade muffins for breakfast on Sunday. 

The party was on Saturday, guests weren't coming until 3 so I had the morning to prepare everything. We had a bit of a twist with a special guest coming over to spend a few hours with us in the morning. She was visiting from Japan and came up to visit with us while the people she was staying with were at a memorial service. She was great and jumped right in helping us decorate for the party and decorate cupcakes. Then the girls took her outside and taught her how to play croquet and bocce ball. 

It was a beautiful day for eating outside. 

While thinking ahead to the next morning I realized with setting the clocks ahead and more than likely going to bed late I was going to be one tired cookie in the morning so in order to sleep as long as possible, I decided to put all my dry muffin ingredients in to large ziploc bags (I was making blueberry and chocolate), then on the outside I wrote the wet ingredients and the temperature of the oven. This way when I woke up everything was ready to dump in to the bowl and wet ingredients added. Towards the end of the day I decided to just go ahead and make them that night and store them in airtight containers for morning. The ziploc bag idea was still great because everything was ready to go and I just threw them together. 

I always use this amazing and easy pizza dough recipe. It's my go to recipe and doesn't take long at all. 

For dessert she requested Oreo Cupakes. Oh wow! were they yummy. The original recipe that I made last year for Kait's soccer team was found here. For some reason I never posted it on my blog after I made them...say what! They were a huge hit. For Kristianna's party I changed it up a bit to make it faster, made a different filling and I actually forgot to make the truffles...oops. That's okay, no one missed them this night. All in all it was a fun night. We were thankful for great weather where most of the time spent was outside, including a bonfire with S'mores in the evening. 

Recipe for Oreo Cupcakes with White Chocolate Buttercream Frosting

Ingredients:

1 box Devils Food Cake (or could use white cake mix)
1 package of Oreos (regular, double stuff, whichever one floats your boat)
cupcake liners

Frosting: 

6 oz. white chocolate, finely chopped or 6 oz. white chocolate chips.
3 sticks unsalted butter, softened
1 tsp. vanilla
pinch of salt
3 c. powdered sugar
chopped oreos

Place cupcake liners in muffin tins. Split open oreos and place one in each liner (filling side up). I don't recommend the foil liners or the mega stuff. For some reason the cookies came out really hard and the filling melted. They didn't do this when I made them in the fall.

Mix cake according to directions and drop in to muffin liners. NOTE: you can also crush up oreos to put inside the batter, but I forgot to buy enough.

Bake according to package directions. 

For frosting:

In a small saucepan, melt chocolate over low heat. Set aside to cook slightly. 

In mixing bowl blend till smooth the butter, vanilla and salt. Add the melted chocolate and beat till smooth. Slowly add powdered sugar until smooth. NOTE: I needed to put this in the fridge for about 10 minutes because mine was so soft I didn't think it would work, then placed in fridge after frosting.  My butter may have gotten TOO soft. 

Frost cupcakes and top with crushed oreos. 

This was my simple version. The above link to the other recipe and truffles was amazing too. Both are worth it. 

The key to making parties successful is to try and keep it simple, at least for me it is. Plan ahead so that you can eliminate some steps that are more time consuming or that are unnecessary. 

 Here were the ones I made last fall..link is above. These have a cream cheese frosting and oreo truffle. Note in the picture below how the cookie filling is still intact. 

It also amazes me how expensive parties can be and how much people spend. I know what I spend, and it's not for an extravagant party. I think I'll do a post on this another time. 




With Joy UNquenchable,