A Party. . .

I was recently flattered to be asked to help a friend cater for a first birthday party. Of course I hit Pinterest for some inspiration, and here's what I ended up doing:

Marshmallow & Mini M&M flowers . . . .

. . . held in place with melted white chocolate. . .












. . . and finished off with pretzel sticks.

(I made lots ^_^)




















Pretzel ladybugs

Chocolate covered pretzels (I bought them like that), then dunked in coloured white choc for the red, added some white choc drops & choc sprinkles)

Frozen Kiwi fruit on a paddle pop stick + . . .

. . . melted chocolate = . . . .

 . . . yum!

The recipe actually called for the chocolate to be mixed with coconut oil, but I read the recipe after I'd started cooking & they worked out OK, although as the chocolate started to cool & the kiwi started to warm up the chocolate would slip off rather than stick. I just popped the chic back on the double boiler & kiwi back in the freezer for 5min & started again

I did mini versions with grapes & blueberries to send to daycare with the smidge of chocolate that was left over -my waist line thanked me :-)

Rose patty cakes/cup cakes

These are vanilla

This is the first batch I made & I misjudged the quantity of icing so ended up with 4 plain red-iced cakes which I dipped into pink & white sprinkles

You can see already how the icing has started to melt. . .

I really should have known this would not end well . . .

But at the time I thought they were rather cute. . .

. . . especially for a first attempt

The tutorial I used can be found here (apologies, I couldn't get the actual tutorial link to work, it's the 'Perfectly Packaged Rose Cupcakes' tutorial)

Then I made some chocolate ones. . .

Only this time instead of trying to make a line of colour. . .

. . . I tried to fill the piping bag 50-50 with vanilla/choc icing

Some of them worked better than others. . .



















But they all worked out OK & tasted good (well, having misjudged the last lot of icing I went overboard and then had a little icing left over so I made another batch of vanilla cake for us to use it up)

The next morning (day of the party) I decided to make another batch of vanilla. . .

I think the icing worked out much nicer this time. I used writing icing gel instead of icing as the feature line. The first one out of the bag (below) is a bit icky, but as you can see I got a bit better with practice, and the bonus batch of cakes I'd made the night before were able to be decorated with the remaining icing so the dodgey ones were kept for us - it's a sacrifice my husband was willing to make :-)

You can see the melted icing in the background - not very appetising for a party, but just fine for us to eat at home. . . my waistline no longer thanks me for earlier niceness :-(

The best I've saved for last - cheesecake cones!

You can find the cheesecake recipe here.

I used Arnotts Royals for the choc tops






The milk choc top ones are full of cheesecake, while the dark choc top ones have marshmallows in the base of the cone, so only about 1/2-1/3 cheesecake mix.

I used 3x250g Philly; 900ml cream; 5 Tbsp castor sugar & 3x150g Oreo to make 2 dozen full cheesecake mini waffle cones and 2 dozen half & half mini waffle cones, so I'll let you do the math on that one for yield ;-)


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~J

Disclosure: This is not a sponsored post. This post was written for Loving Lunches. No product was received for this post.