I’m so excited to share our
Cars & Trucks Birthday Party
with you today!
We had a ton of fun and, thanks to being able to visually gather ideas on Pinterest, it was easy to plan and fairly stress free to put together!
I focused on color scheme (blue, orange, & gray) for our party decor and food.
I really loved planning it this way and it made it super simple!
I will put a list of where to find items I used at the end of the blog post.
The balloons on each side of the table may be my very favorite aspect of the decor!
They had a huge impact for little cost and very little work.
I bought 20″ balloon sticks and put paper straws on them make them a little more fun.
I put the sticks in old tin cans that I had wrapped in twine.
Our main party drink was orange citrus water. Mmmmmm, good!
Unfortunately I didn’t bookmark the recipe and now I can’t find it, but basically you cut up some oranges, a lemon, a lime, and add some cilantro to water. Its pretty, tasty, and healthy!
I also had some orange cream soda available as well as sweet tea because, hey, this is the south, y’all!
The orange creamsicle cake was absolutely divine!
And, yes, that is in past tense. It is long gone!
In my opinion, this cake is absolutely hideous, but the taste more than made up for it! A lot of it had to do with the orange-flavored cream cheese frosting (both the hideousness and the great taste!).
And though you can’t really tell in the photo, its an orange ombre cake!
You find the recipe at Tales from Tangerine.
I did make some edits to the recipe. Instead of separating the batter into fourths, I separated it into halves essentially doubling the recipe. In turn, I ended up cooking each cake twice as long.
There are some stories to tell about this cake, but I think I’ll save them for this weekend’s Social Saturday post. So if you’re curious to know about the not one, not two, but three catastrophic events of this cake, you can find them here!
The Food:
I wrapped my cake pops holders with scrapbook paper that was a source of the cars & trucks party inspiration.
I filled them with brownie truffles covered in orange and blue chocolate icing.
I filled a wire basket with clementines.
Inside decorative take out boxes I placed candied orange slices, white rock candy, and peaches & cream gumballs.
In little paper cups I had small carrots with ranch dressing and blueberries & cream.
Perfect portions!
The sky Jello was super yummy and perfect for our littlest partiers.
We also had bbq pulled pork, bbq chips, cheese puffs, and potato salad for lunch.
I think the potato salad was my only non-color scheme food!
For my backdrop, I taped blue and orange streamers to a dowel rod and settled it on top of my big picture window in the kitchen. We had the table pushed up to the window so it made for a bright and festive background!
I strung up my Sunburst Straw Chalkboard Wreath in front of it with a message to our birthday boy.
I decorated our wooden party untensils to match the decor
by stamping them in blue ink with my Chevron Stamp!
Making it work: I could not find a 1st birthday Mylar balloon that worked in my color scheme and had a matching and/or generic theme. So I bought a balloon I could alter to work for me!
This blue and purple balloon was super cute with the little cupcake, but the purple had to go so I used a circle punch on orange scrapbook paper to cut out circles to adhere over the purple spots.
Easy peasy and now it matches my decor!
I made my little guy a shirt to wear for his party. Its the same car that is on his birthday invitation!
I put fusible webbing on my fabrics (all from my stash!! no new material! you might recall my goal of not purchasing fabric in 2012!) and cut out templates for my car, circle, and #1.
I ironed it all together and it came out super cute!
I must admit though that I chickened out big time on this project.
I wanted to stitch around the edges of the fabric but lost my nerve to do it.
It wasn’t necessary, but I thought it would make it even cuter.
Maybe next year?
I made a fun bunting of my little guy’s first year.
Its fun to see how much he has grown and changed!
It was a big hit with my party guests. Especially the ones that didn’t get to see him very often!
Mandys Foodie Blog
Monday 9th of April 2012
Saw you on 30days pity party linky....that cake looks wonderful!! Orange Creamsicle is my FAVORITE!! The little birthday boy shirt cute cute! Good Job.
Mandygirl's foodie blog
Monday 9th of April 2012
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Lolly Jane
Friday 6th of April 2012
OhEmGee Michele, this is stinkin A D O R A B L E !!! So sweet- betcha your lil man had a blast :) Great details. Love love love!
Amy @ Positively Splendid
Wednesday 4th of April 2012
What a perfect party!! I cannot believe he is already one. Time goes by so quickly!
lindseykelly
Wednesday 4th of April 2012
Love that picture bunting! soooo cute, what a good idea. your whole party looked great!