Saturday, March 15, 2014

Putting Together a Quick & Easy Minecraft Birthday

Earlier this week we celebrated the middle child's birthday.  Where the last few years have gone is a mystery to me!  The night before his birthday we went on a mommy/son date for a haircut, dinner and a little shopping trip to Toys R Us to spend the gift card and birthday money that had arrived in birthday cards that day.  While we were out together I said to him that I didn't think I was ready for him to turn five and asked if he could be four just a little bit longer... he's a smart little guy though, and replied with "How about I be four for the rest of the night?"  Ok.  Guess I can't argue with that...

He is a Minecraft fanatic.  I'm not quite sure how that even came to be, but Minecraft on the iPad, Grandma's computer, playing "real life Minecraft" and watching Minecraft videos on Youtube consume his little (now) five year old life.  I should also mention that he was Steve from Minecraft for Halloween!

He had seen some Youtube videos of different Minecraft themed cakes.  One in particular in the shape of Steve caught his eye and he had me watch it with him multiple times.  Unfortunately for him, my cake skills are severely limited... fortunately for me, Pinterest has a plethora of Minecraft themed birthday ideas and I found a cake that I thought we could replicate AND that would satisfy our blonde birthday boy AKA DanRidesMinecarts. 



This is what we ended up with, I was so happy with how it came out and our birthday boy was pretty excited too!  It was easy to control the portions on this cake, we only needed to have enough for our little immediate family, but you could easily build something similar on a larger scale.  For this cake I used one box of chocolate cake mix, two 6oz packages of blue jello and one batch of Rice Krispie treats (and ended up with leftover "blocks" of each)  I used square pans, either 8x8 or 9x9, to make each component so it would be thicker and more block like than having the batter spread out in a larger sized pan.  I also grabbed a can of green Betty Crocker cupcake frosting, and the star tip was perfect for making the grass on top of the dirt blocks.  I will freely admit that the star of the cake was the little figures we found to put on top.  I was hesitant to fork out $25ish dollars for these guys, but he has played with them every day since his birthday so I've considered them just another one of his gifts.  We found the packaged figures on Amazon, Core Player Survival Pack and the Creeper Pack

The one thing I forgot to consider were candles for this awesome cake.  Thankfully the man of the house came to the rescue with the brilliant idea of using matches to represent the Minecraft torches. (I apologize for the crummy picture, but you get the idea)




We also decided to go the Minecraft route with birthday treats for his preschool class.  Again, with the help of Pinterest, we were able to come up with a cute and fairly inexpensive idea.  I like coming up with things that are a little different than the standard store bought, sugar bomb cupcakes.  I bought clear treat bags from the Dollar Tree (they come in packs of 25), a roll of green curling ribbon, a bag of stick pretzels, rolos and new cookies and creme Hershey's Kisses in very diamond-like blue foil.  Too keep these preschool friendly, each treat bag got two of each candy and a handful of pretzels.  The real Minecraft highlight of the treat bags were these free printable tags I found on Pinterest.  We downloaded the ones we wanted to use (diamond, gold & sticks) to a USB drive and took them to the office supply store to be color printed on cardstock.  HERE is the site I found on Pinterest full of great party ideas AND free food printables.





 All in all, I think we pulled off a pretty fun day for our boy!  Without breaking the bank, without spending WEEKS upon WEEKS planning and preparing and still managing to give him a themed birthday to remember.


Happy 5th Birthday DanRidesMinecart!










 

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