Saturday, February 4, 2012

Piston Cup Party

I really had good intentions to blog more this year...

Things have been really busy around here, but I'm not complaining. If January is busy it goes by faster. That's fine by me. It also helps that the weather has been unseasonably warm. We had one short cold snap in January that really didn't amount to much. Now we are in the midst of a "heat wave" with temps consistently above freezing during the day. Basically it's sugaring weather the first week in February.

Speaking of the first week of February, my baby just turned five on Feb. 1st. I can hardly believe it. No more babies or toddlers or preschoolers here. It seems like such a short time ago that I thought I would never have all my kids out of diapers.

We let our kids have a friend birthday party on their 5th, 8th, 12th, and 16th birthdays, so this was a party year for Jesse. He requested a Piston Cup (from the movie Cars)cake.


I decided to try sculpting the Piston Cup out of rice krispie treats. It didn't turn out so hot, BUT I know what to do differently next time so it WILL work. The rice krispie treats really need to be made further in advance. They need time to really dry out and harden. Because I didn't realize this, they were kind of droopy. It also made it difficult to work with them for creating detail work. If they were hard I could have carved better detail into them. I will definitely do this again.


I didn't get any good pictures of the decorations, but I used black, white, red, and checkered flags for the decor. I found some fun black and white checked streamers and napkins. I made a bunch of black and white and red pompoms. Jesse told me that even though pompoms are kind of girly, we could use them for his party. I think in the masculine colors and mixed with the checkered flags it works for a boy. Every kids birthday party needs balloons, in my opinion, so I got black, red, and white with checkered flags.


(I took these as an afterthought last night after the balloons had been taken down.)
In keeping with the race theme of the party, I picked up some boxes at the grocery store and let the kids decorate them to use as race cars. The kids stepped inside them, held them up, and ran and ran and ran.


They had a blast! I thought it was an interesting informal study on the differences between boys and girls. The boys were not very detail oriented. They spent about 2.6 seconds crafting and they were already hot and sweaty from racing before the girls had even completed their cars.

(The boys are those blurry spots in the background.)
The girls colored pictures on the cars, carefully placed stickers, arranged streamers in the most aesthetically pleasing manner. It was pretty funny. By the time the girls were ready to race, the boys were worn out!

Jesse had a great time. There was a lot of running and screaming and organized chaos. I'm still recovering.

1 comment:

Tara@JustDevineStyle said...

What a great cake! I am sure the kids loved the party looks like a blast. My Son think the cake is amazing.