Preschool Pirate Party

Avast, Me hearties!

Jack, had his 3rd birthday this weekend and his mum asked me to do some entertaining and make some cupcakes.

So I hopped onto google images to find some cake toppers to print out and put in the top to dress them up.

After looking at plenty of suitable printables websites I found the lovely site Cottage Industrialist...lovely craft ideas which the site owner is generous enough to publish lots of printables for free.

When I found out Jack's Auntie Louise had made a big pirate ship cake I wanted to create its own mini armada to go with it so these printables hit the spot. The sails are fantastic with the faux high seas.

The cupcakes were made using a vanilla cupcake recipe from 'The Hummingbird Bakery Cookbook' which, I might add, never fails to turn out perfectly. Topping the cakes is a basic chocolate butter icing piped on using a large star shaped icing nozzle from Lakeland.

These are the pictures of my attempts...

Cupcake 'boats'

Cottage Industrialist has a few different printables to match the ingenious cupcake wrappers, bunting, envelopes, invites and thankyou notes all with the nautical theme.

To go with the cupcakes, which are huge, I also made some smaller toddler friendly sized cakes for little mouthes.

I made a batch of vanilla cupcakes using the same recipe as the cupcake boats in Skulls cupcake cases then iced them with Baby Blue coloured water icing and topped with a sprinkle of hundreds and thousands and a chocolate coin.

Buried treasure cupcakes

So even though the party was a toddler party I brought along some additional items just to make the table look abit more "piratey" as Jack said when he sat down :)

I used some knarly 'old' black cloth that I originally bought from Toys 'r' Us last halloween but you can find this in any party or costume shop. Added to that is a foam skull, an old brass candlestick found in a charity shop and the treasure chest from the pirates treasure hunt. A good helping of pirates pieces of eight were added as table confetti.

The tableware is all from the Skulls theme to co-ordinate with the cupcake cases.

  

We ran the usual pass the parcel which had the obligatory too many layers and a jelly baby in each layer.

A twist to the usual pass the parcel is to place a piece of paper in each layer with a fun command such as 'clap 3 times', 'shout ahoy!' etc instead of sweets.

A pirate themed bouncy castle was also hired for the little ones to bounce around to their hearts content. As there was a mixed age range of kids it was great because the littleones were too young to concentrate on playing games continuously for the whole party.

Make a wish!

All in all a great time was had by all and the little finishing touches really made things even more special. All very little details that anyone could do, especially when armed with google, you never know what you might come up with!