Hello Kitty comes to party at Becca Towers

Our kids have winter birthdays (well, if you live in the Northern Hemisphere they're in winter), so never really get to play outside during their parties.  It never seems to matter, but I'm aware of the lack of opportunity.  So I fancied giving the girls a party for going back to school.  It's Mini-2's first year of school, and today is the end of her first week of full days at school (they went only half-days for the first few weeks, to ease them in) - what more excuse does one need?

I also happened upon a really, really cute boxed party set of Hello Kitty.  The box had 8 matching paper plates, cups, napkins, party hats, and horns.  So fun, right?  And 3 months plus was a long time to wait to use it.

So I decided to challenge myself a little bit and try out a two-tier cake again (my birthday was the last, and first, one) and to match it to the napkin colours.  A local cakey friend, L, had Hello Kitty cutters that I borrowed (and have since bought my own) and I used them to make the little faces for the sides of the cake, and to make the cookies.  But first the cake...

I tried to match the colours of sugarpaste, and was quite pleased.  I made the pink myself, but bought some green sugarpaste and added in white until I was closer to the shade required.  The top of the cake looked quite bare, and wasn't perfectly flat and tidy.  So I remembered learning this trick for making ribbon when I was at cake school, and thought it would look perfect on top of the cake.  The girls loved it!

The top tier is chocolate cake coated and filled with chocolate ganache - another challenge.  The Aussie's seem to use ganache almost exclusively, in place of buttercream, but I found it quite difficult to manoeuvre and get smooth.  So if you look too closely, you'll see the bumps in the green cake.  The lower tier was vanilla cake with buttercream, at which I have more practice - so looks a bit smoother.

Now, the cookies.  Here they are naked, ready to be baked.

 And deliciously golden, out of the oven.

 And finally, dressed in their matching green and pink outfits :)

Here is the table all laid and ready for the party guests (we have 6 chairs, so the girls were able to choose 2 friends each), set with the matching paper crockery at each place and the co-ordinating snacks (red grapes an fresh green peas)

 And finally a close up of the cake and cookies in situ - welcome to school girls!!!

(an update - the girls never played outside during this party either!! ha ha. they were having too much fun messing about indoors)