J’s Birthday Party!

Posted on | February 8, 2010 | 2 Comments

Family: more photos here on Flickr.

Woohoo!

Ok, is it sad that I didn’t realize his 6th birthday party was on the 6th? Because it didn’t connect for me until just now.

But enough of the sadness! Because the party was all about gladness.

Back up a little to the day before: the boys and I had fun prepping the house. I baked the cake part of the cake. Thank you very much, Trader Joe’s, for the exceptionally good vanilla cake with vanilla bean bits and lots of yum. Two boxes: four layers. Yumx4.

Then, we started blowing up the balloons. In our home, we have at least two working ball pumps. They should work, right? It took me five minutes to inflate a balloon to a diameter of three inches. In less than two minutes, J manages to inflate one to capacity. Believe it or not, between us, the boys inflated about half the bag of balloons and it contained 72 12-inch balloons. With our own lungs. If you wondered about how much hot air I have in me, wonder no more!

ballooooons

We finished blowing them up on Saturday morning. You know what? 72 balloons didn’t cover our entire living room floor. But 72 balloons was just the right amount for fun.

Later that night, around when I should have been going to bed, I made some chocolate mousse. I’m not sure if I did it correctly because I managed to taste bits of gelatin in the piece of cake I had so it’s safe to say I could have left it out. I’ll show you what happened with that cake in a bit.

FF>> the day of the party. We had fun! J was very happy to see his friends and get to hang out with them. NM was bored but he played tennis outside and his friend R came over so they got to hang out. The kids all played hard and enjoyed the balloons while the adults hung around the food. I mean hung around each other but with food.

And there was cake, of course. Here it is:

cake iced

Now let me try to remember how the mousse happened, because it was easy and it wasn’t bad, though I was concerned for a bit.

Chocolate Mousse
1 pint of whipped cream
1 c. sugar
1/2 tsp. cream of tartar
1/2 c. cocoa (instead of melted chocolate, hence easy)
2 tsp-ish of vanilla
1/2 tsp. kosher salt

Run the cream of tartar, sugar and cocoa through a sifter to remove lumps. Add salt, mix all thoroughly. Whip cream and cream of tartar until you get stiff peaks. Fold in sugar/cocoa mixture along with vanilla. I read you can put all the ingredients together and chill before you whip it so I might do that next time to avoid having to fold it all together.

I did have some Knox gelatin in there somewhere, but I wouldn’t bother.

So I eyed the mousse and figured out how to divide it three ways for each layer. Viola!

cake mousse

The frosting? That was a mish mash, also. That’s what happens after reading too many recipes.

Whipped Cream Frosting
1 pint of whipping cream
8 oz. cream cheese, softened
1/2 can of condensed milk
2 tsp. vanilla
pinch of salt

Whip the cream cheese. Add everyone else and whip them, too. To be honest, I think there was a bit too much cream but everyone seems to have liked it. It wasn’t too sweet at all, either. Hubby liked it and he isn’t a cake person.

J’s expression isn’t from the cake, it’s because the candles’ flames have colors to match the wax:

blue and green flames - wm

He was a little concerned about the wax melting onto the icing. Reasonable thing to worry about but we didn’t let that happen. He enjoyed it. And the lettering? Let me just share a tip: don’t put melted chocolate in a baggie and cut a teeeeeeny hole and try to pipe it unless you’re absolutely sure there’re no unmelted bits too big to go through said hole and insist on making them go through the hole only to cause the bag to sprew gobs of chocolate and eventually break open. The plus side is your mess is entirely edible should that happen.

cake cut

Note to self: learn how to use flash with the camera.

eating cake - wm

The celebrant enjoyed his day. I had fun watching him open his gifts. I heard myself automatically say “Now say thank you, J, to the person who gave you your gift” when I realized that he had been SO polite and loudly said thank you for such-and-such gift to each person who gave it. No prompts needed. Such a thankful heart!

Afterwards, the kids went upstairs to watch a 3-2-1 Penguins DVD. J had been asking for one and I was so happy that he enjoyed it.

When all was said and done, I asked him if he had fun and without hesitation he said “yes” and “I’m so happy, I got everything I wanted!” It was a blessing to watch him enjoy the day and to see him express such a thankful attitude. God has certainly been working in his spirit.

Gal 5:22-23 NKJV – But the fruit of the Spirit is love, joy, peace, longsuffering, kindness, goodness, faithfulness, gentleness, self-control. Against such there is no law.

Category: Family Stuff, Foodie Stuff, God is Great
Tags: > > >

Comments

2 Responses to “J’s Birthday Party!”

  1. Linda
    February 9th, 2010 @ 5:56 am

    Yum! What a cake!

    He has gotten so big! Do you find yourself wondering where the time has gone?

  2. phisch
    February 9th, 2010 @ 2:44 pm

    Linda, are you kidding? Every day I do. I’m much too sentimental for my own good.

Leave a Reply