MiniVantastic: birthday party

Like many almost 8 year olds out there, my son was obsessed with the MineCraft video game. So when it came time to pick the theme for his birthday party, this was kind of a no-brainer. At the time however, I was not that familiar with the details of the game. I decided to educate myself, so I watched some online tutorials, asked him some questions, and soon I felt I was good to go. One word to mostly sum it up: square. Everything in the world of MineCraft is pixelated and therefore made of squares, so I had to think "inside" the box.

Here is the tutorial I watched (I also included it in my Evite, in case others were unfamiliar):

http://www.minecraftopia.com/how_to_play_minecraft

And now on to the party details of our "MineCraft Madness" party . . .

DECOR:

On the front door, I hung a vintage looking MineCraft poster, purchased at Walmart. Since they were only $5, I got a different poster to hang up inside the house as well.

I decided I wanted to make a big impact with a large creeper head. To create this, I taped salad size square paper plates (7 inch) in shades of green and black to the wall. I covered the food table with a "grass" tablecloth. I also picked up a few large square bowls for food and large square dinner plates for the buffet. All of these items were purchased at Party City.
http://www.partycity.com/product/kiwi+paper+square+dessert+plates+20ct.do?from=Search&navSet=square%20plates&bypass_redirect=1

I drew creeper heads and TNT with a sharpie on heliums balloons. I also added little creeper heads to a paper lanterns garland from Party City. http://www.partycity.com/product/kiwi+lantern+garland+12ft.do?from=Search&navSet=green%20lantern%20garland&bypass_redirect=1

This MineCraft banner was purchased on Etsy (instant download, then printed and cut out at home).

https://www.etsy.com/transaction/136811758

ACTIVITIES:

Since "crafting" is how you create things you need in MineCraft, I decided on a crafting area at the party. Kids were able to make a pickaxe with popsicle sticks and tin foil or create a "skin" with small squares of paper. I pre made the masks by cutting out eye holes and a mouth and attaching them to popsicles sticks. This saved a ton of time at the party!

FOOD:

I used food directly from the MineCraft game for our buffet (melon, carrots and cookies). We also served square pizza (I ordered from a pizza place that cuts their pizza into squares, so handy!). Also from the game, we had "sticks" (pretzels), "spider eyes" (grapes), "water" (blue jello) and "lava" (red jello). The "creeper juice" was Warheads sour apple squeezers (purchased at Walmart) with the label removed and a creeper label added.

The cupcakes were from Safeway. I simply ordered chocolate cupcakes and ask them to decorate them with green "grass" on top. I purchased the cupcake toppers from Etsy (download only, print and cut out at home, attached to toothpicks). https://www.etsy.com/transaction/136486065

For the cake plates, I created TNT labels and glued them to red square plates.

This awesome party was actually very simple. The food was ridiculously easy, the decorations were simple to create and had a big impact, and were mostly "made" (printed) by me. It was easy on the budget, a good bang for your buck, if you will. If you know a MineCraft lover, I highly recommend throwing them a party like this one, they will LOVE it, trust me.

So, being the wonderful, amazing friend that I am, I volunteered to bring cupcakes for a monster themed first birthday party for a good friend's son. My first thought was to scratch the whole "homemade" component and just order cupcakes from the bakery. I've recently been on a mission to simplify my life and this just seemed the logical, easiest solution.

But, after a few peeks around Pinterest, and seeing a few easy ideas, I decided that I was up to the task of baking them myself. Afterall, how much more gratifying would it be to show up with amazingly delicious and adorable cupcakes that I actually made myself. After a much longer period on Pinterest, I settled on brightly colored sprinkles and marshmallow eyeballs on toothpicks. However, after a trip to ABC Cake Decorating and a brief discussion with an expert there, I decided to attempt a "grass" tip to make furry monster cupcakes, complete with various sized sugar eyeballs.

I used this recipe for the cupcakes (the only change I made was to use French Vanilla flavored cake mix). http://www.recipegirl.com/2007/03/16/white-wedding-cake-cupcakes/

and I used her buttercream frosting recipe and followed the directions exactly: http://www.recipegirl.com/2007/03/16/wedding-cupcake-buttercream/

I decided on bright colors for my little monsters and bought special food coloring at the cake decorating store, I went with red, blue, green and orange (I added lots of drops to make these colors extra bright).

I also decided that striped cupcakes would be way more exciting than one simple color each. I meticulously scooped in layers of two or three colors into each cup. This turned out to be an extremely time consuming step, but in my opinion, very worth it. They were adorable!

Notice the bright hues!

Next was the frosting. For this, I used the same colors as my cupcakes.

The grass tip was a bit of a challenge for me, but hey, these are monsters and they don't need to be perfect. With the addition of the eyeballs and mouths, they were perfectly wonderful in my opinion.