Hot dog!

I love a good theme. In that spirit, I planned R's third birthdya party with the tongue-in-cheek theme of a sausage party. It was going to be almost all boys in attendance after all! So we stocked up on brats, hot dogs, and veggie dogs, and I made bowls of all the fixings. We even got Ruby a special costume for the occasion.

I wanted to make a hot dog cake of some sort, but those all the recipes I found online involved wrapping artifically-colored fondant around Twinkies. That did not sound appealing, and frankly I find food that looks like something drastically different than it tasts like is gross. So I decided to go abstract:

                                                          I made a lemon cake that was very light, tart and tasty. Then I had T roll two cartons of raspberry sherbert into a log to be our hot dog. We wrapped it in waxed paper, and let it refreeze in the freezer. When we were ready to go, I sliced the lemon cake down the middle and put the hot dog in place and a swirl of whipped cream from a can became our surreal mustard. It was really tasty.

I wanted this party to be super fun for the kids, but I did not have the energy to plan a lot of games and activities. Instead, I invited just our cousins, grandparents, and the family of our old nanny. And I rented this:

I didn't tell the boys it was coming, and it was so much fun to watch them watch the guy set it up! They had a blast jumping around in that thing and were sad to see it deflated at the end of the day.

--MM