A Royal Birthday Party

For my little Boo's 6th Birthday, I wanted to do a fun Medieval themed party, with knights and princes and dragons and all.  I started combing the internet for inspiration and stashing them in my Pinterest file for "Birthday Party Ideas".  I started with some easy decorations found online, knight themed and with a color scheme in my head, to match the birthday banner that we use for birthdays in our family.  I like to have fun with coordinating things and bringing it all together.

I found this set and picked the items that we needed, purchased from Birthday Direct.  I have ordered from them before, and we've been very happy with what we've received.

I chose gold and silver cups and plates, to keep with a more general castle feast feel, and it costs less that way too.  I did find some great theme perfect cups on Amazon.com, so I ordered those too.

A few fun wall hangings and a dragon pinata and I was ready to start designing the cake, which I was SURE had to be a castle.  SO...off to Youtube.com for a few tutorials.
The problem I had at first was that most of the tutorials I found either involved fondant or a square cake pan, and I did not want to have to buy a new pan for this one, and I have not worked with fondant as yet, and needed to limit my work load as much as possible...within the realm of my crazy need to do all of this in the first place.  After a few videos, I sketched out my intention to make a castle cake on a round cake base, with a few turrets and little to no artificial coloring.  This cake was also gluten free as a few of our guests had a limited diet.  Thankfully, I have experience in the GF cooking and baking department, so it was no trouble at all to make the entire menu GF dominant.  Everything we prepared was either GF or organic.

I love party planning...and I haven't done it in quite a while, so I may have gone a little overboard...BUT...with a medieval theme party, how could I not go for the fun themed foods!
So, I pulled together a few easy to eat things that I knew would be delicious and practical with kids and not require too much preparation for us.

THE FEAST:
-Baked chicken legs from THIS recipe
-Mini meat balls
-Finger sandwiches (PB&J)
-Kale/spinach bites (from Trader Joe's)
-Dragon Eggs (hard boiled eggs...treated with food dye...in our case, natural food dye)
-Children's "Mead" (white grape juice and water...yes, it actually tastes like mead!  Really cool)

 I wanted to get pics of the food out on the table, but it was GONE before i could find the camera.  Speaks well of the food though, right?

Want to slay a dragon?  YES!!!  ...and he shed dragon scales (glitter confetti), chocolate gold coins, fruit leather, fruit snacks, plastic jeweled rings, and ring pops 

I also read a great book for the kids, called The Knight and the Dragon by Tomie DePaola to keep in the spirit of things.

I had HOPED to prepare felt crowns for everyone in our little royal court, but I ran out of time and had to drop the project.  I have found that knowing one's limits is key to having a good time, and not getting stressed out.  

THE CAKE:
I started with a Bob's Red Mills Gluten Free Vanilla Cake Mix.
Easy to use, delicious in the end.  I did use Coconut Oil instead of the suggested vegetable oil, which added a hint of coconut flavoring...but that was a pleasant surprise in my opinion.

I also prepared organic (wheat flour) chocolate cupcakes from THIS RECIPE.  A...MA...ZING.

The chocolate frosting, from the same recipe as the chocolate cake, is the BEST chocolate frosting I have ever tasted.   It's all natural and so so so yummy.  

I was not sure at first how to make the turrets, but utilizing some of what I learned from watching Cake Boss and my love of Rice Crispy Treats, I knew that was the way to go.  Then, I remembered a trick I used to use when making candles, and it's a great re-purpose/recycle secret: 

Pringles Potato Chip cans = AWESOME MOLDS FOR STUFF

SO, rice crispy treat based pillars and turrets!  Simply stuff the hot treat mix into an empty, clean Pringles can, and when they are hard, peal the can away.  

 THEN, I made a second tall tower and cut and shaped the top until they both looked how I wanted.

 Using my favorite butter cream icing recipe, I mixed up a triple batch and colored it with my all natural blue dye, which comes out a lovely shade of grayish lavender; perfect for a castle!

 I placed the short tower on the cake base, after prepping the base layer with a "dirty icing" layer.  Then using a plastic cake leveling scraper, I cut stone-like markings around both, to try to imitate castle stone.

 I had purchased a bunch of cookies and such to experiment with for castle windows and draw bridge, and in the end, chocolate wafer cookies won. They were cheap, light, easy to cut and shape and looked super cool IMO.    *please ignore the piles of stuff behind the cake in the photos.  My husband had not yet removed the unsightly piles of recycling from the corner of the room, and I didn't want to have to move the whole cake just to take a photo.

 The turrets were ice cream cones, smoothed over with frosting and rolled in red sugar.  The red sugar was the only "bad" dye I used.  I placed a few cupcakes in their designated spots, topped them with cones and voila!  Castle cake.  The cupcake wrappers and knight toothpick decorations were also purchased on Amazon.  Not cheap, but SO cute and really added a special touch.  The cake basically ended up costing around $35 to make, but it was FUN and enjoyed by all.  I think it really added something special to the day.

In the end, the birthday boy was happy, and everyone had a great time.  That was the goal...and I got to have fun doing it!