Woodland Birthday Party: The Food

Food is such an important part of any birthday celebration. For my son's Woodland party, we had a cake that resembled a tree stump, cupcakes that looked like wild mushrooms, and other food to carry the theme. The birthday table was decorated with a burlap scrap for a runner and some Playmobil trees. (Playmobil is our party theme decoration of choice!)

We used more burlap to wrap candy for our goody bags.  Each bag was fixed with some twine and a wind-spinner. We displayed them in a small evergreen. The artificial Christmas tree was shocked to be dragged from the attic in May!

We started the party with snacks.  These s'mores-on-a-stick are easy to make.  We dipped marshmallows in melted chocolate and then rolled them in crushed graham cracker. Notice the stuffed animal decorations; I was glad to finally have a use for the 2 million Beanie Babies we own!

Other snacks included 'Mushroom Tops' and Woodland Mix. The 'Mushroom Tops' are really pizza bagels with pepperoni bits; my son thought they resembled the tops of wild mushrooms and, surprisingly, none of his friends questioned this.  For the Woodland Mix, we let the guests mix blueberries, strawberries, Strawberry Yogurt Cheerios, and Annie's Homegrown Organic Bunny Crackers.

The cake was a simple round cake decorated with chocolate icing. I used a serrated knife to spread the icing, creating the texture of wood, and I added spots of dark food coloring that I blended into the icing to make 'knots' in the wood.  Fondant was used to make small twigs sticking out of the tree stump, bees, and leaves.  We made acorns by slightly melting the flat sides of Hershey kisses and sticking them to mini-Nilla wafers.  The candles on top formed a "7".

The cupcakes (in the top picture) were chocolate with a vanilla icing. In the butter cream frosting I used more red food dye than I care to admit. My son used the cap of a McCormick's flavoring bottle to cut the circles from plain fondant to give each cupcake its spots.