Our three year old’s racing car party

My youngest boy is very keen on birthday parties. He loves the dancing, the games, and he especially loves the cake. Last year we had a great hungry caterpillar party, which we did on a budget, and with a zero plastic into landfill policy.  I wanted to do something along the same lines this year.

Our boy was very keen to talk about his upcoming birthday party at least six months before he actually turned three. First he decided he wanted a dressing up party and he would be the star of the show, dressed as spider man, or maybe super man, or maybe bat man. He seemed to spend a lot of time thinking about his party and I hoped I could pull something off in line with his superhero proportioned expectations.

And then at the last minute he changed his mind. He wanted a racing car party. There was no detail provided, unlike his many thoughts on what would happen at his dressing up party. It seemed that I would have carte blanche. As long as it was ALL about racing cars. Hmmm.

The party would be small, for about 8-10 children and their parents, and at home (the sunshine was ordered).

I made these simple but lovely invitations on Vista Print, which are cheap as chips (but they charge a lot for delivery).

I bought a racing car pinata from Ebay and filled it with bargain bucket Haribo that I picked up at Hobbycraft.

We planned a simple craft activity, to fill sometime between cake scoffing, parcel passing and pinata whacking.  The craft activity was to make glitter storms in some of our old glass jars that I have keeping for months for no apparent reason. It didn’t involve racing cars unfortunately as I couldn’t find any teeny tiny cars to glue into the jars. Instead I bought tiny plastic goldfish, which worked really well. We used sequins and glitter from the boys’ craft stash. And the sun shined, so we did the crafting out in the garden, which was great, as we caused quite a lot of glittery, watery mess. The children seemed to really enjoy it.

Finally, I find a use for all of those jars I've been saving.

Ready for glitter storm action!

The finished product

This racing car cake was the centre piece of our lovely boys’ party tea. It was made by me, with much love, and unfortunately for me, it involved a little bit of blood too. As usual, I was trying to do far too much (ice cakes, make biscuits, wrap presents, tidy the house). I had forgotten to take the butter for the icing out of the fridge, so decided (sensibly) to stick my hand blender into the butter to soften it.  I then (rather stupidly) stuck my finger in the hand blender and almost took half of my finger off. I then proceeded to faint on the bathroom floor and ended up at the NHS walk-in centre where I needed my badly cut finger cleaned and dressed.

Anyway, the birthday boy adored is cake, which is the main thing. And it doesn’t matter at all that I ended up having to take penicillin when my finger got rather infected later in the week (not bitter at all!!)  All I will say is that perhaps next year I will just pop down to Waitrose and buy one of their nice birthday cakes.

My lovely neighbour provided me with this fantastic jelly mould (which can also be used as a cake mould too). I had forgotten how much children love jelly and really should have made more.

As the party had an anti-landfill stance I decided to borrow these gorgeous plates from a very lovely toy shop in Bath called My Small World. If you spend a few pounds in their beautiful shop (I spent £4) they will loan you this lovely melamine party ware for FREE!

Before...

...and after

And once the pinata had been whacked to pieces,  the food had been eaten, and musical statues played, we gave out car-shaped biscuits instead of party bags and sent the party goers on their way. My lovely friend Jo stood in at the last minute and knocked a batch up while I stood and moaned about how much my finger hurt. She really is a star, and my creative mothering mentor. Thank you Jo xx

thanks Jo.