A Mickey Mouse Clubhouse Birthday

 Wow, sorry that I have been a little non-existent on the blog here for the last couple of weeks.  I had my daughter's 3rd birthday over this last weekend and I had invitations, party favors, craft projects, and a cake to make for it...all at the last minute of course!  Seriously, I saved most of it till the week of for some reason....no idea why!  But now that it is over, I need to get back into some normal crafting...although I promised some graduation announcements for my nephew...so I better not procrastinate on those!!


So I thought I would share with you today all that I have been doing...all to make a Mickey Mouse Clubhouse Birthday Party as special as my sweet little girl!  This is a long post, so grab a cup of coffee (at least that is what I need right now!) and enjoy.  First I made the invitations.  Since I was running way later than I would prefer, I kept them very simple. Most of it was designed on the computer and then I added the stamped/embossed/colored Mickey Mouse on top.  Again nothing spectacular but I thought they turned out cute.


Then came the party favors.  See I follow Jessica Witty's blog (she is the amazing former Go-To Gal for Paper Crafts magazine whom I have actually chatted with via FB...my brush with fame! hehe!) and she did this adorable project during a Papertrey Ink release of a paper mache hot air balloon.  Well when I decided to do Mickey Mouse Clubhouse as the theme for my daughter's party, I immediately thought back to that project and how I could transform it into the Mickey Glove Balloon from the show.  Yah....fantastic idea...one I definitely should have started weeks before the party...one that I started the week of the party.  I blew up some latex gloves, taped down the pinky finger (Mickey only has 4 fingers), taped on a paper ring on the bottom, and paper mached it with tissue paper and gluey water.  Near the end I was sort of cursing Miss Jessica's name (really I still love her) as paper mache is a very time consuming process for 7 party favors!  After I paper mached them, I paint them white and added the black marks like Mickey's glove.  All of this would have been fine and dandy really until I decided to pop one of the "balloons" too early (i.e. before it was completely dry) and it imploded!  Mind you I only had exactly 7 gloves to work with!  Thankfully my husband was smart enough to think about blowing up a small regular balloon inside to get it to blow back up, we re-glued it, and let it dry for days...just to be sure!  Again all during the week of the party.


I then built a paper basket and glued it all together with some cookie pop sticks.  I printed all of the kids names out and attached them to the basket.  Then I filled the basket with the silly little trinket toys that kids love and parents hate!  My kids have loved them...they put animals and figures in the basket and fly them around.


Next up was the cake.  Of course I had to make the cake into the Mickey Mouse Clubhouse!  I did my typical research online when thinking up a cake...to see what others have done.  No sense in re-creating the wheel!  But alas, as I have often found, a lot of others use Fondant to create a lot of cool stuff.  I do not know how to use fondant nor do I like the taste of it.  So I took some of the ideas and came up with my cake.  The base is two 9 x 13 cakes and the Clubhouse body is a cake made in a bowl that was the roundest one I had.  The shoe, head and ears, and the slide are all made from Rice Krispie Treats.  This is where the challenge was.  One, the ears did not want to stay on the head.  Two, warmth makes the ears not want to stay on the head even more.  So there was 4 toothpicks in each ear holding them in place and I frosted quickly and threw them in the fridge so they wouldn't fall off...again!  I got a little smarter with the slide and stuck it in the freezer for a little bit before I tried to frost it.  

 

 I normally would have tried to smooth out all of my frosting, but due to the warmth / things falling off issue, I decided against it cuz I didn't want to mess with them anymore than I had to!  I kind of like the look though...kind of artsy looking...or am I just making myself feel better?!  The circles around the sides of the base were to mimic the circles on the invitation.  That Mickey Mouse head was heavy...didn't really think a big ball of Rice Krispie treats would be that heavy, but it was!  I had to walk very, very slowly when carrying the cake around because the head was kind of teetering on there a little bit.  I was so nervous it was going to fall off!  But all worked out, and my daughter loved it! 


I will leave you with my big 3 year old girl!  Just now noticed that she has a lovely snotty nose in this picture...ah well, kind of goes with the girl...and I do LOVE the girl!