You guys, I think I am going to LOVE age six.
I somehow managed to sidestep most of my Annual Mooning About My BAYYYYBEEEE Getting Older. I’m not going to lie – there were some tears, and some general stomping around that I attributed directly to said mooning. But it seemed less severe than in years past? Maybe because I was so busy?
Do you remember when I briefly fretted about Carla’s birthday a few months ago? I carried through with the rainbow leopard theme. (Cut to my perplexed mother-in-law, “Is ‘rainbow leopard’ a TV character?”) Making this theme work was Not Easy. Despite the fact that both rainbows and leopards are SUPER popular right now, I had the hardest time finding anything that combined the two. It was even tricky to find much that was leopard print!
BUT I SUCCEEDED.
Invitations
The invitations I wanted were too expensive (about $40 for 20 invitations, because of course you can only buy them in batches of 15 or 20, and we invited 16 girls) (and that $40 doesn’t include shipping [$7.99] or postage [$8.00]). Sigh.
Around here, people do e-vites for just about everything, so I started looking on e-vite sites and found these lovelies. But my husband refused to pay money to send an e-vite, so I GRUDGINGLY admitted that probably not a single parent would even remember the theme of our e-vite and sent a free one that was about painting (Carla had a painting party at one of those places geared toward women who want to drink wine and paint sunsets.). I was NOT PLEASED because I like things to match all the way through, but OH WELL.
Paper Goods and Other Decor
After you all kindly recommended against spending $60 on rainbow leopard print paper plates and napkins on Zazzle, I came to my senses. (I mean, I wasn’t REALLY going to do it anyway.) (Was I?) I started looking for alternatives.
Lots of places had rainbow options – Party City has an especially large selection. (Side note: Only one place I looked – was it Party City? I can’t remember – had an array of plain napkins/plates in all the colors of the rainbow. I would have gone with that a long time ago, but it was one of the last places I looked.) But man did I want rainbow leopard ones! I kept googling and searching Amazon and Target. And then one day the clouds parted and a little lightbulb appeared over my head and it said, “Walmart!” So I went to the Walmart website and voila! There were the EXACT PLATES AND NAPKINS I had been dreaming of! And GOLD leopard print candles, to boot! AND the plates and napkins were something like $2 a package! I spent $12 total. A STEAL.
(Photos from walmart.com. The cake is there only to illustrate the leopard print candles, which is difficult to glean from the photo alone.)
Of course, they were only available in the store, and the store in question was 45 minutes away. But I drove that 45 minutes, I’ll tell you! I haven’t been in a Walmart in years and I don’t feel any urge to go back again soon, but it really came through for me in a pinch.
Before I found the magical Walmart plates, I was planning on using plain plates in rainbow colors. So I bought some rainbow leopard print cupcake wrappers, excuse me, baking cups, so that there would be some rainbow leopard flair on the plain plates. I ended up using them anyway, despite the overabundance of rainbow leopard print. They were very cute and, even though there were 36 in the package, I wish I had bought more of them.
Amazon had balloons that matched the baking cups, so I bought two of those. Even though our local balloon place claims they can’t guarantee balloons you buy outside of their store, I have had good luck bringing in my own balloons. And the rainbow leopard balloons lasted much longer than the regular latex balloons (in rainbow colors) I ordered from the balloon place.
This balloon would still be hanging around if I had not finally popped it like I did all the other ones. My child goes NUTS for balloons, which is very cute but also prevents her from doing things in a timely fashion like brushing her teeth or going to bed.
By the way, did you know there is a helium shortage?!?! There IS! So the balloon place only allowed you to get, like, ten balloons. (I certainly did not need more than ten balloons.) And that number was lower if you had mylar balloons. It was wild.
Party Favors
The whole reason I went with this rainbow leopard theme in the first place is because I found the perfect party favor.
I am cute and cuddly and also a Rainbow Mother Effin’ Leopard.
Photo from amazon.com
Listen, kids LOVE the favor bags they get at parties – the ones with little jars of bubbles and tattoos and pencils and bracelets and tiny containers of slime. They go bonkers for that stuff. My kid sure does. But I am a Mean Mom and I do not like that stuff in my house. It ends up on the floor or in a drawer and heaven forbid I try to throw it away because it is SO PRECIOUS.
So I fight this trend in my own way, by spending what I would have spent on tchotchkes on a single gift. Last year I did a unicorn search-and-find book. The year before, when Carla had a pizza party, I gave the kids a Curious George and the Pizza Party book. This year, I had my eye on a rainbow leopard plushy, which I knew Carla would go NUTS for (she loves stuffed animals) and which was $5 apiece at Party City. (Michael’s later had a sale on the very same leopards, but the sale was only applicable in-store, and I didn’t feel like running around to all the Michael’s stores in the region to track down 16 leopards, if they even existed in such a quantity. Plus I found the sale something like four days before Carla’s party, so I was already panicked about OTHER things.)
So I got 16 leopards and my mother-in-law and I wrapped them in plastic favor bags and tied each bag with a rainbow of ribbon colors. The girls loved them.
I also got Carla a bigger version, for $8 from Amazon, and a little keychain version from Claire’s for $3. She loves having a mommy and a baby leopard, too. And now I have three rainbow leopards of varying sizes in my house, but it’s still better than a bag of tchotchkes.
The Sweet Treats
As in previous years, I made cupcakes for the friends birthday party and a cake for the family birthday party. I used this tried-and-true cake recipe for the cake and I used boxed mix for the cupcakes. The cake recipe makes GOOD cake (and my ex-confectionary caterer mother-in-law says it has a really nice crumb), but, as I have said before, it is DENSE. The denseness was a good thing for this recipe, because it is a layer cake which requires nice sturdy cake to hold up to the all the frosting, and, frankly, the batter was nice and thick which was a desirable consistency for all the piping I had to do. But I really think I need to just go with a mix in future years. (I have said this before.) I find that it tastes just as good (and I always amp up the vanilla flavor with extra vanilla bean paste) and the texture is just so much softer, which I prefer.
(Note to Future Me: NO ONE CARES if it comes from a box! And you like it better!)
Making rainbow leopard baked goods was very time consuming. First you have to make your batter. Then you have to divide it and color it.
So many dishes.
Then you have to do the layers. Simple enough, but time consuming.
In brief: You do a thin layer of white batter. Then you draw thin concentric circles in black. Then you “trace over” the black circles in a thick layer of colored batter, varying the color order so that you don’t have a big clump of all-purple spots. Then you “trace over” the colored circles in another thin layer of black batter. Then you fill in and cover everything with a thin layer of white. Then you repeat, making sure to vary your color order every time, until your cupcake cups/cake pans are half full.
I kept forgetting which colors I’d used… and forgetting whether I’d remembered to add the top layer of black batter… And at one point I ran out of white batter and had to make a new batch. SIGH. I learned the hard way that you really have to use MORE of the colored batter circles in between your black batter circles – that seems to be the key to getting real leopard-like spots.
Cute even before you open it up!
The cake is the same thing, batter wise.
Much easier to do a thin stripe of black and a thick stripe of color because I had more batter/surface area to work with. I also used a smaller piping tip for the black batter.
And then the frosting is hard, too – you have to make it, do your crumb coat, chill your cake, divide out the rest of your batter, color it. Then you have to frost the thing. I bought myself a cake turntable (this particular one because it also came with icing tips, and I wanted more icing tips because I had so many colors to work with, and a bunch of icing bags, and a frosting scraper, AND a bunch of other useful goodies – totally worth it; would buy again), which was tremendously helpful in frosting this particular cake. You pipe on big thick strands of frosting in the color order you want, and then you hold the frosting scraper vertically against the side of the cake and turn the turntable and the frosting gets nice and smooth. We all have our particular gifts, and doing anything resembling straight lines is not one of mine, so the layers were neither even nor straight. But I still thought it came out well. For my skill set.
The top was another matter. It seems like it would be much the same thing: you pipe on big thick circles of frosting in the color order of your choice and then position the scraper so that one corner is in the middle and the other corner is at the very edge of the cake (this only worked for me, by the way, because my cakes were six-inch rounds; you’d need a much bigger icing scraper for a bigger cake) and then you gently press down while turning the turntable. Not as easy. Despite my crumb coat, some of the frosting kept un-sticking from the cake and I had to re-pipe some colors, which resulted in some color bleeding and a VERY thick top layer of frosting.
The top view is not as perfect as I’d like, but WE PUSH ON NONETHELESS.
Oh well. This is what happens when you are an amateur home baker, I guess.
I would say that both the cake and the cupcakes were successful. The cupcakes slightly moreso, both from an aesthetic and taste perspective. I did some practice cupcakes, which looked NOTHING like leopard print inside. But I think I figured out where I was going wrong, and in the end, the leopard print spots looked leopard-y enough if you squint.
Take 1: This is when I realized I needed to really amp up my use of the colored batter.
Take 2: Slightly better on the color-to-black-batter ratio, but now not enough spots.
Final take: Not perfect, but pleasingly leopard-ish. The kids LOVED these, by the way.
OH. I also was dithering about the frosting for the cupcakes. I thought about doing rainbow swirls. But instead, I found some rainbow leopard print edible toppers on Etsy (from CustomCakeImage4U). They came promptly, they were super easy to use, and I think they looked really cute. They were expensive, but I had an Etsy gift card and this seems like the perfect thing to spend it on. So the final product may be garishly overly leopard-y, but I had a theme and I WENT ALL THE WAY with it.
So charming in their little box! The cupcake toppers feel like heavy plasticky paper. You just set them on top of the frosting, kind of smooth them on, and then let them meld for a few hours.
I don’t think the cupcakes were as pretty as the unicorn cupcakes last year or as vivid as the rainbow cupcakes the year before, but I feel fairly pleased with them.
The cake was, as I said, a bit disappointing texturally. But I think the colors came out exactly right. Very Lisa Frank.
The lines aren’t perfect and it’s not perfectly straight but I am still pleased.
The internal spots, while definitely not as leopard-y as I wish they had been (they came out more stripe-y, I’d say), were at least leopard-y enough to give the appropriate leopard impression.
And I ended up feeling very pleased with the frosting. I did the black dot outlines (I have no idea what else to call them) by hand with black frosting (I bought special super black food coloring for the black batter and frosting so they would look truly black and not grey) and I think they turned out well.
So much frosting.
Did I mention that MY OVEN DIED? It did. I had already made the cupcakes. But I was in the middle of piping colored frosting into my cake pans when I realized I needed to preheat my oven. I turned it on… and it just never heated up. (Turns out the ignitor was dead. It is fixed now.)
I took my cake pans over to my neighbor and asked if I could use her oven, and she said yes because she is a dear, darling saint of a woman, and her oven cooked them PERFECTLY. And I had an extra excuse (besides too much baking) to eschew cooking for the weekend.
These two breezy paragraphs make it seem like my oven dying amid the most stressful and emotionally fraught time of year was no big deal. And it really wasn’t, in the grand scheme of things. But at the time I WAS A MESS. It was a DISASTER. Anyway, all’s well that ends well.
While I still think my rainbow cake takes the cake (heh) for being the prettiest, most professional cake I’ve ever made, I feel satisfied with this rainbow leopard cake. It’s not perfect, but it got the job done. And I don’t need to do it ever again.
The Party
The biggest birthday disappointment (for me) (moreso even than the oven dying) was the party itself. It was, as I said, held at one of those paint-while-you-drink places. They specifically offer a KIDS’ BIRTHDAY PARTY, and I specifically asked for — and was told I would get — an instructor who is good with kids, but nonetheless it was not a good fit. I could rant on for thousands of words except a) boring and b) I already sent many Very Displeased paragraphs to the company via their online feedback process (and have heard NOTHING) so I will spare you. Suffice it to say it was not a good choice.
Impromptu table scape my dear mother-in-law set up after they informed us that the party room in which our party was to be held didn’t have enough chairs or table space for all 16 girls. Wait, no, they didn’t inform us; I counted the chairs at the single table they had for us and realized there were only EIGHT. For SIXTEEN girls. Even though I’d had to tell them ahead of time how many kids were coming, and even though I’d visited in advance, and they’d shown me the room (with a different set up, so I didn’t know about the lack of space issue), and I’d planned my entire decor set up (tablecloths, snacks, etc.) based on being in that other room. I AM STILL NOT OVER IT. Thank goodness for my mother-in-law. Look how she folded the Walmart napkins so that they all say happy birthday! Look at how she used WRAPPING PAPER as a tablecloth! Genius! Savior!
Well. For ME it was not a good choice. The kids seemed to enjoy themselves. Some of the things that I hated – lack of specific, clear instructions geared toward a six-year-old, unanticipated breaks during which nothing was planned, looooong stretch of time at the end that was supposed to STILL BE PAINTING PARTY (I am not going to start; deep breaths) (this is just the tip of the complaint iceberg; deep breaths) – the girls either didn’t mind, didn’t notice, or straight-up loved those things. They each painted a painting, and their wildly diverse interpretations of the exemplar painting were super cute and they all got to take those home with them. Plus, they are all schoolmates, so they had fun together. Carla, I must point out, seemed to really have a great time. And I suppose that’s all that matters.
(Grumble, grumble, I am so glad I thought to bring packages of [rainbow] goldfish so that we had something to do when the instructor said, at 10:30 in the morning, that it was time for a break so the paint could dry and the kids could eat. The pizzas were not arriving until 11:30! No one had told me there would be a break in the middle of the morning! What the manager told me was that the party would be 90 minutes of painting and then we’d have one hour for eating and hanging out! ARRRGHHHH!)
The painting exemplar that all the kids were instructed to paint. Not a leopard, but at least it’s got the RAINBOW thing going for it.
Anyway, it all worked out okay. (Grumble, grumble.) But I would NOT recommend this particular place for your birthday party needs. Not for six-year-olds, at least. I don’t know if it would be better for adults, but at least it’s probably easier to overlook some of the disappointing stuff if you’re sipping from a big ol’ bottle of wine.
The Newly Minted Six-Year-Old
Birthday party woes and triumphs aside: Let’s talk about the kiddo herself.
Five was a great year. But now, we are six. And six is great so far. My big kiddo (heaven help you if you call her “little”) (“I am NOT little, Mommy! I am big!”) still wakes up singing. She is the most cheerful, agreeable person I know, even as she is cheerfully, agreeably doing exactly what SHE wants instead of what you have asked her twenty-nine times to do. She is curious and enthusiastic and full of ideas. She is actually, really, truly READING now, although I think she’d still prefer it to be EASY at all times. She is still in nonstop motion from dawn until her body finally just shuts off, midthought, at a later time than one might hope. She is fun in new and unanticipated ways – participating in real conversations at dinner time, for instance. She craves responsibility and gets so visibly proud when you cheer her efforts and successes. She loves Barbie and the Wow! in the World podcast and stuffed animals and Piggie and Gerald.
I got to see, for the first time, an example of the “leader” she can be in a group setting. Her teachers have been saying this for years, that she’s a leader, that other kids are drawn to her and want to follow her lead. I thought that was code for “bossy,” to be honest. Or maybe… a kinder, more diplomatic way of reframing what we once called “bossy.” And, yes, she certainly seems to enjoy ordering people around. But at her birthday party, the staff member at the painting place was less than experienced at working with the six-year-old set. Turns out that there is some downtime during the painting experience, during which the kids do… what? No one prepared me for this, and I, too, am inexperienced with entertaining a large group of giggly first graders. He tried, at first, but his voice was too gentle and/or the game he suggested was not doing it for this crowd. When the kids were uninterested and started milling about in a vaguely pre-chaotic manner, Carla took over. She – very loudly; her voice needs no megaphone – directed everyone in a game of Three Things (where someone gives three clues and the group has to guess what the person is describing). Everyone listened to her and participated in the game until the instructor said it was time to resume painting. Later, she led the entire group in some loud chanting. And, seeing her potential, I then asked her to redirect the group into something more positive, which she did! And then, when the painting party ended a FULL HALF HOUR before it was supposed to, she led the kids in a dance party and then in a series of poses that I was able to photograph for posterity. They ALL listened to her and enthusiastically did what she ordered them to asked. It was magic.
She is such a great kid. She becomes more interesting and more kind and more fun and more challenging and more HER every year that I know her. I am so deeply grateful that she is my daughter. That I get to be her mom.
There you go, Internet. Another birthday in the books.
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