Rainbow Marshmallow Treats

March 14, 2018 ~ lk529 ~ 6 Comments

Last month I shared how I’ve been developing my own curriculum when it comes to holiday themed school units for my preschoolers (with a lot of help from Pinterest).

It’s time now for me to share something from our St. Patrick’s Day “studies.”

Disclaimer: This post contains Amazon affiliate links.

St. Patrick’s Day was only a big holiday for me when we lived in the FL panhandle because my best friend was (I mean, she still is) Irish and we celebrated 4 SPDs together in a row. Quite fun.

I admit I know nothing really about the holiday. Yes, I could go google that right now, but I’m not going to; let’s be real.

But hey. I ordered two books to fit the holiday off Amazon (funnily enough the library didn’t have materials left for me to check out!) and we’ve read them 8 times today (aka yesterday). Guess they’re a hit: There Was an Old Lady Who Swallowed a Clover! and Ten Lucky Leprechauns. (Personally, I prefer the latter.)

Firecracker absolutely loves rainbows so I knew we’d have to focus on the “pot o’ gold at the end of the rainbow” idea of the holiday. He doesn’t get it. (Hey, I don’t either, kid.) But a rainbow activity and craft – he’s all for it.

We made rainbow paper chains and learned about how staplers work – quite an interesting machine! “I’m very curious about the stapler.” These cute crafts act as my prop for the star of the show – the Rainbow Marshmallow Treats.

Rainbow Marshmallow Treats #StPatricksDay | Sew You Think You Can Cook

Think Rice Krispie Treat made with Trix cereal.

I know marshmallow treats made with Lucky Charms are incredibly popular this time of year, and rightfully so, but I wanted to go a slightly different route this week. They’re definitely fun, festive, and applicable more than once a year – they’d be great for birthday parties!

Rainbow Marshmallow Treats

Ingredients:

1/2 stick butter
1 bag mini marshmallows
1 box Trix cereal

Steps:

Melt butter and marshmallows in a large pot over medium heat. Stir until smooth.
Remove from heat and fold in the cereal, mixing until cereal is fully coated.
Press into a greased casserole dish and let set before cutting into squares.

Rainbow Marshmallow Treats #StPatricksDay | Sew You Think You Can Cook

Tuesday Tattles: 2nd Birthday

December 26, 2017December 23, 2017 ~ lk529 ~ 2 Comments

I hope everyone had a wonderful Christmas surrounded by loved ones. We’ve been enjoying the sunshine and time with grandparents. The kids were beyond spoiled and the joy and wonder of Christmas was evident everywhere.

Tuesday Tattles

My Treat turned TWO in October and we celebrated with a playground party in early November. (Little fun fact: shopping for birthday party decorations the week before Halloween is slightly insane.)

My guy has had an attraction to sports balls as early as I can remember, and he’s naturally athletic, coordinated, and too brave for his own good. A sports themed birthday would be a no-brainer. And then he had me second guessing my decision with an obsession with animals that rivaled anything to date! We celebrated his actual birthday with a trip to the zoo. If he continues his love of animals and zoo trips, you’ll be seeing an animal themed third birthday next year

As has become my birthday tradition, I made a banner for my birthday boy. I punched out circles of cardstock and decorated them to look like baseballs, tennis balls, basketballs, and a soccer ball. Even ovals for footballs. I used navy stickers for the lettering, to make it easier.

I stuck to the four “main” sports: football, soccer, basketball, and baseball. (If the Chicago Cubs had made it into the World Series a second year in a row I definitely would have adjusted to a Cubs only theme.)

This birthday party was the first of the 4 we’ve previously thrown for the boys that did not include extended family. I am grateful for fantastic friends who offered their help in setting up and taking down the decorations at the park.

The décor included:

Green table cloths
Small white plates for the dessert table
Gold oval plates for the snack table (they looked like footballs!)
Red and yellow napkins
Blue spoons and forks
The party favor bags were simple black cellophane bags and stored in a large football shaped bowl
- Inside the bags were bubbles, sports balls, chocolate candies, and dum-dums

My favorite part of any party décor are the balloons. Turns out this old soul of mine has a little kid in it, after all. Those wonderful friends I mentioned at the beginning of this post came over early to help us blow up about a dozen balloons, including the mega #2. The balloons got all tangled before even leaving our house, and my OCD self let it go, because it looked really cool! We didn’t even make it out of the front door before we lost 10 of the balloons, including the mega #2. The screams that emitted from my children were heard from the playground where daddy was setting up. He saw those balloons fly into the sky and came running to help console. Heck, I was a wreck, too! I hadn’t gotten a single picture of my guy with his #2 balloon.

The food helped bring the sports theme to life, one dish for each sport:

I made the superfood layer dip again, arranging the layers with shredded cheese on top and decorating it with black beans to create the stripes of a basketball
My favorite display was the fruit tray to look like a baseball field. I used my largest rimmed baking sheet and arranged five small ramekins for the bases and pitching mound. Those were filled with pretzel sticks, toothpicks, chocolate hummus, and caramel yogurt dip. Different fruits were arranged to create the outfield, infield, and stands
I’d ordered a pull-apart cupcake cake from the local grocery store to look like a soccer ball and it turned out fantastically!
I made cocoa krispie treats in the shape of footballs and decorated the laces with melted white chocolate

Just like last year, we had a threat of rain, but the sky cleared and it was a beautiful, slightly windy day, perfect for a playground party.

Tuesday Tattles: 2nd Birthday

July 26, 2016July 21, 2016 ~ lk529 ~ 18 Comments

Tuesday Tattles

It’s finally time to share my Firecracker’s second birthday party, with you!

When we moved to California and became regulars at the playground I quickly realized it’d be a great place to have the kids’ birthday parties. I scoped out the venue for months to determine when would be the best time of day to throw a party at a public park, to figure out if it’d be allowed, and to decide which picnic table to claim. I then had to start asking around about how big the 4th of July got around here. The answer was a resounding “crazy!” So I knew that we simply wouldn’t be able to celebrate on THE day. (Good thing it wasn’t his 1st birthday!)

We celebrated on a Sunday at 10:30 am. Firecracker is only two weeks older than our friends’ son and so we did a dual birthday bash for the 2 year olds. Our guest lists would have been identical anyway. The party was attended by other families who moved out to California from Ohio the same time we did. And by happy coincidence, my dad had meetings in Los Angeles the following week so my parents came out for the party and my mom stayed out here to play and help with the kids while my dad was in his meetings!

I had originally planned (aka – when he was born I picked out his first four birthday themes) on having an Auburn themed birthday party. It was hard for me to change my mind, but I knew that my train obsessed toddler would much prefer a train themed party. So, I let go of my planning and switched gears.

This party was much smaller than his 1st birthday, so instead of ordering a cake, I decided to simply make cupcakes. I made 4 dozen cupcakes – way more than I needed. About half of them ended up in my freezer unfrosted. I displayed the cupcakes on Twizzler train tracks on our dining table. I made Busy Day Chocolate Cake with Chocolate Cream Cheese Frosting and Vegan Vanilla Cupcakes, my friend made the frosting for the vanilla cupcakes.

Cupcakes for a Train Themed 2nd Birthday Party

Down at the playground we set up a table with snacks. I cut out black circles and taped them to disposable aluminum loaf pans to create train cars. My friend had popsicle sticks which we used to create a track for the food.

A fruit train of pineapple, cherries, and red and green grapes was led by Orange Cream Dip and Chocolate Hummus. A veggie train of cherry tomatoes, broccoli and cauliflower, and carrots was led by Sour Cream and Onion Dip and Ranch. We also had a container of hummus. Salty snacks of pretzel sticks, potato chips, and “pigs” in a blanket joined the party, too. I traced a train cookie cutter to cut out the labels for the respective dips.

A train themed 2nd Birthday Party

After a couple of hours at the playground we moved the party to our place for grilling and cupcakes.

Decorations were fairly minimal too. I used the major Thomas and Friends character colors as my inspiration, blue, red, and green for Thomas, James, and Percy, respectively. I wrapped streamers around the banister for the stairs and tied some balloons on each end of the staircase. Balloons were attached to chairs at either end of the table were the cupcakes were displayed. Two sets (1 balloon of each color) of balloons were placed on Thomas the Tank Engine balloon weights and taken down to the playground to bookend our picnic table.

The biggest decorating endeavor was the Happy Birthday Banner. The banner was placed above our awesome 80’s style mirrored fireplace. I didn’t have a single hole puncher (I do now!) and couldn’t fit the train shapes in our stand 3 hole puncher, so my mom strung the banners together with a needle and thin yarn.

I found templates for a train engine, train car, and caboose through Google searching. I printed those out on colored card stock. I had two blue trains for the birthday boys’ names, a red train, and a green train. 4 red cabooses, and 19 grey train cars! For the letters, I used the font Ariel. Three letters at a time were typed in WordArt at font size 96, then I sized the WordArt graphic to be 3.48″ x 8.81″, making sure the letters would fit inside the train cars, and then selected Rotate Flip Horizontal so that the text would be backwards. The words “2nd” and “and” followed the same method except that the WordArt graphic was sized at 1.52″ x 3″. The letters were arranged to look like railroad crossing signs and put on two 5″ yellow circles. Everything was cut out using a craft knife and adhered to the train cars using small glue dots.