So for Max’s party we’re having a Perry the Platypus cake – but we needed a little cake for his actual birthday. Max requested a blueberry molasses cake. I know. I love my kids.
I found the recipe here: it’s the second time I’ve used it and both times the cake has turned out of the pan beautifully (even though I totally just used cooking spray). It’s much more like a quickbread than a cake, and I like it very much.
However, for birthday usage I thought it needed a little more pizazz, so I mixed up a little batch of frosting.
Yeah, you’re jealous now, right? Sorry guys, I don’t really use a recipe for frosting. I just sort of add ingredients until it’s what I want. In this case there was four ounces of cream cheese, three tablespoons of butter, some milk, powdered sugar – more powdered sugar – about a quarter cup of ‘Robust’ molasses, and then (because I wanted it thicker but not sweeter) a bit of flour. I’ve never put flour in my frosting before, but when I found out that it didn’t ruin it I added some more. It gave it almost a batter-like flavor which I like very much. We will definitely be having molasses frosting again sometime.
Now, we don’t always have one but we wanted to give Max a birthday party this year. A really awesome party. A party that he’s going to remember and look back on fondly as ‘that time I had a really cool birthday party.’ However, it’s not in the budget (nor is it our style) to rent a pavilion at the zoo, or hire a clown and bounce houses, or take a weekend trip to Disneyworld. In short, we were looking for a cheap way to trick out our living and dining room for maximum birthday awesomeness.
The answer (probably to no one’s surprise) was balloons!
Now, here’s the thing. Balloons are cheap. It’s the helium that gets expensive! You don’t really need it though, balloons add enough color and fun without it – you just need a place to hang them. In the past this has indeed been a sticking point, as tape won’t stay and any other options involved driving a hole through the wall unless you happened to want balloons where you already had something hanging (curtain rods, etc). However, this year I happened to have most of a pack of Command hooks left over from hanging garland at Christmas, and so it was game on.
I had originally planned to make a balloon banner à la Design Mom, but I decided that a banner four balloons thick would just be a little much for our living room. Instead, I ran some yarn from the hook on the end to the hook in the middle, and then another piece from that hook to the hook on the other end. Then, I tied a small piece of yarn around each individual balloon and tied it around the yarn up on the wall. This gave me the distinct advantage of being able to slide the balloons up and down as I added more balloons. Then I added some loopy crepe paper things to each end, and it’s well on its way to awesome-land.
That’s not all, though!
We made clusters of three balloons and stuck them in the corners, then hung a little more crepe paper between them. That’s another benefit of using the hooks – they did a great job holding up the streamers as well as the balloons. We hung another pair of balloon clusters and another pair of streamers just like this on the wall opposite, above the window.
So! 2 packs of blue balloons + 1 pack of orange balloons + 1 roll of dark blue crepe paper + 1 roll of light blue crepe paper = $5. Covering the house in ballons? Priceless.
Oh, and if you’re wondering about all the blue and orange –
(Greg took that picture in November of 2009. Oirase Gorge. Look it up, save your money, and go. I love it. I kid you not, I want to go there again before I die.)
My happy place is the place in my mind where I pretend that I’m not throwing a birthday party in five days or launching a webzine in a week. In my happy place, I have plenty of time to complete all of the tasks that I’ve set for myself and maybe bake a loaf or two of banana bread in my spare time.
My happy place is both full of it and delusional.
But hey! You guys shared some great links this week!
I’d love to see something interesting. It can be something you posted or something you ran across, but please link to the specific post instead of a website.
Feel free to link to as many as you like!
Have a recipe? A tutorial? A finished project? Philosophy on life? Anything? I’d love to see it.
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