On Saturday we celebrated Ada’s first birthday. Since we call her Ada B, or Ada Bumblebee, the party was entirely bee themed. I may have gone a little overboard…
Ada’a cake was a honey spice cake decorated with honey icing and held together with buttercream. It was made in a Nordic Ware beehive mold, and decorated with tiny candy bees and flowers. To be completely honest… it was delicious, and I think I found a new favorite cake recipe. I’ve always loved spice cake, but the honey flavor really shone through, without overpowering it.
I made a double batch of Honeycomb Caramel Snack Mix. It made me feel trashy to buy sugary cereal, only to add more sugar to it, but damn it was good. Everyone loved it, and I’m going to have to make more, just to use up the family sized box of cereal.
I made a huge platter of chocolate dipped pretzels and candy bark. I dipped the pretzels in yellow (white) candy melts, then drizzled with milk chocolate to look like stripes. The bark was a batch of white chocolate with drops of leftover yellow, and the other was milk chocolate. Both were filled with pretzels, Butterfinger bits, Reese’s Pieces, Oreos, and sprinkles.
The decorated sugar cookies came from a lovely lady in town called Fairytale Sweets. She is amazing. The cookies were so detailed, I couldn’t stop staring at them. There were beehives, black eyed susans, honeycomb hexagons, honey pots, her name, and hexagons with bee silhouettes.
I found the plates, cups and napkins on Amazon. Since I forgot to get an action shot of them, here’s one from the website.
Since most of my craft supplies are still packed, I relied on paper decorations from Amazon, that mom & I put together a few days before.
I also created a balloon arch from a kit on Amazon. It was both harder and easier than I imagined it would be. I bought a balloon filling pump for $20 on Amazon, and it worked great. But it woke the baby… And the balloon tying tools that came with it didn’t work well for us. So we filled the large & XL balloons with the machine the night before, with my mom tying them all, because she is somehow amazingly good at it. Tying 3-4 in the time it took me to do one. My husband blew up all the mediums himself, the old fashioned way, to let the baby sleep. Then on the morning of the party, my MIL, mom, and I finished blowing up the smallest ones, and built the arch, and suspended it with Command hooks. People seemed pretty impressed with it.
I forgot to get pictures of the rest of the food, but I did a crockpot full of honey bbq pulled pork on Hawaiian rolls, mini quiche, crudités, fruit salad, crackers and lobster roll dip, hummus and pita chips, and my mom made deviled eggs, which I decorated with black sesame seeds and black volcanic salt, for ever-more black-white-yellow. Because if you’re going to go over the top, go all the way over.
The birthday girl managed to even stay pretty clean eating her cake!
YAY!