paige's milk & cookies party

to help catch up on posts i missed i knew i should mention my lovely niece Paige's 6th birthday party. during the initial planning stages we were hoping to have a dual party with my other niece fiona but, unfortunately there was quite the delay in her visa paperwork and it took several months longer to get her home than originally planned. i'll tell you more on that later but for those that don't already know, she's home and fitting in quite nicely!

lisa, my sister, and i had been planning a milk & cookies themed birthday for several months and during the initial stages the only thing i knew was that we were going to have it in the fellowship hall at our church and that i wanted a smaller version of this oreo cake to be the centerpiece. i'd seen it on an episode of martha and fallen in love (how could you not!)

we also knew that we wanted several kinds of cookies and most of them would be homemade since we are ridiculously obsessed bakers when it comes to holidays, birthdays, because-you-need-baked-goods-days. then i stumbled upon this post from V and Co. (love the blog!) with these lovely cakemix cookies.

i instantly knew i had a theme and would have to work the oreos back in somehow. our fellowship hall was already decorated in lots of fun colors so all we had to do was set up some tables, balloons, trays of cookies, some smaller pre-bottled milks and call it a day.... easy as pie, er, um, cookies! easy that is, until my sister realized that a milk and cookies birthday with a stacked oreo cake meant that there wouldn't be any actual cake at the party. i had known this all along but apparently she had not processed the thought. we then brainstormed and debated (fancy word for argued) and brainstormed and came up with:

oreo cupcakes! chocolate mini cupcakes for the kiddos, one giant cupcake with her birthday candle (thanks to a large starbucks sized muffin pan my mom uses to make homemade giant muffins) and no worries about a cake-less birthday. we stuck mini oreos in the oreo buttercream and voila! the other centerpieces we discussed were cookie bouquets coming out of glass milk bottles. unfortunately at the moment i don't have the full photos to show you (i'm really bad at remembering to put a memory card in my camera so i hijacked my sister's but then forgot to download the pics before giving the card back, oops) but here you can see the cookies on a stick post-decorating.

i didn't search around a lot for a method to do these although i probably should have, i used my favorite sugar cookie recipe, laid the cookie sticks onto a baking sheet and laid the cookies on top of them as i cut them out. i barely squished the cookie around the stick because i wanted the cookies to stay fairly flat for decorating and only had a couple fall off but they fell off straight out of the oven so i re-used the stick to make more, super easy. I made royal icing according the recipe that came with my wilton meringue powder and went to town. it really was that easy. we found glass milk bottles, filled them most of the way with rice and stuck the sticks in.

the only decorations we purchased were balloons and colorful tableware. i'll probably update this more later with the photos of how everything turned out and the custom game we made for less than $10 but for now that's all i have. it was a really good day even though we couldn't share it with fiona and we're really glad we planned it inside because half way through the party it downpoured!

cupcakes and my horsey doggie

i'm very near sleep as i write this, so hopefully i don't ramble on for too long. after work tonight i went to the grocery and got enough stuff for a few dozen cupcakes and an egg cake (egg shaped that is). tomorrow is the company meeting and even though we usually get donuts rose suggested we do something different. at noon today making a few dozen cupcakes didn't seem like a big job, pretty easy, and they sell frosting in a can like whipped cream now so you just squirt it out in a pretty pattern and it's done...that was at noon. I got home from the grocery around 9pm and at that point i was thinking that i had lost my mind earlier and should just get donuts and be done, everyone loves the donuts from stone's and it wouldn't be a big deal. then i thought of our spending diet and how i just spent money on frosting, cake mix, cupcake papers, and it would be a waste to just put all of that in the cupboard and save it until i was ready to make some cupcakes so now, 3 hours later, we have cupcakes and an egg cake:i'm sure everyone at work will love them and it did give me some time with my kitchen aid and there's always a beater to lick and some frosting to taste test so other than the massive dose of sugar i'm sure to have in the morning, it was worth it. the only problem is that rockne is used to playing once we get home at night because she's in her crate all day so she was constantly barking at me to play even though i was trying to clean up and then decorate, she rarely barks but usually she's begun barking whenever she wants something and we're not paying enough attention. tonight she 'had to go out' much more than usual and most of her time was spent sniffing and running back and forth. once she finally started to calm down she just kept chewing on what was left of her bone but wouldn't move off of my feet. silly horsey doggie (that would be her new name if you haven't been around recently, it started once she hit the 60lb. mark and continued to run around like a newborn pony). she was jumping all over the furniture tonite (notice the missing sofa cushions and the big wrinkly spots in the others:and then after collapsing gave the innocent look that always melts her mommy's heart:

and even though she looks very cute now chewing on the last knot of her bone i must put her to bed before i fall asleep and wake up with a chewed up laptop. g'nite everyone and if i don't blog before that, happy easter!