Now that I’ve covered the decor and food, it’s time for the actual part-ay! Saturday morning was just as hectic as the previous few days. My dad ran around town picking up all the food and balloons, my cousin, Allison, helped me finalize the table decor, her husband, Zack quickly hosed down lawn chairs and set up outdoor tables, and my Aunt Lynn and I frantically prepped the food items that needed to go out at the last minute.

Oh, and did I mention transporting the rosette cakes and smash cakes from my house to the party locale? That required a few painstakingly slow trips with one person driving and another (usually Aunt Sarah or Uncle Mike) holding onto the cake for dear life. I’m sure my reassuring comments that if so much as a dent was made in the cakes, I would kill them, and what a shame it would be for them to be dead on Samantha and Amelia’s birthday, really rallied the troops.

 

The highlight of the party was seeing my friend, Katie, who happened to be here visiting from Michigan. I hadn’t met her twins, who were born in November, since she had already moved from California at that point. I was so ecstatic to finally hold the darling Iris and Elizabeth! Samantha didn’t share my enthusiasm, but that’s ok. I couldn’t believe how light they felt in comparison to my girls! Fraternal twins, Iris and Elizabeth just turned four months old and were as sweet as can be. Katie wins the award for most calm twin mama on the planet…I can’t even imagine traveling across the country on a plane with four month old twins, or coming to a birthday party with a million strangers wanting to squeeze their little cheeks. I was barely getting out of the house at all when Samantha and Amelia were that age. She is one brave mama!

Daddy and Amelia.

My friend, Michelle, brought her two boys, who were too cool to try the photo booth with us. 

Me, Amelia and fellow twin mama, Venus! 

Venus and one-half of her twin-set, Rachel. 

Not one…not two..but THREE sets of twins! Katie had to leave with Iris and Elizabeth, or else we would have had four sets in this photo!

Cousin love. 

We’ve been friends with Lucero, Ryan, and their adorable protégés, Kennedy and Sebastian, basically since we moved to California and were both kid-less! It’s hard to believe we used to go out to movies and dinner whenever we wanted without having to call a babysitter. 

The craft table was a huge hit!

Ball pit: best purchase ever. The ball pit was the twins’ birthday present and worked out great at the party, giving babies and kids of all ages something to keep them occupied! 

Feeling like a third wheel next to Amelia and Maliyah. 

Here, have a ball!

Wrestling match!

And now, the moment we’ve all been waiting for…cake smash! 

We got Samantha and Amelia all cued up in their tutu-adorned high chairs and prepped them for their cake smash. I had originally planned on having everyone sing Happy Birthday to Samantha first, and then Amelia, with the intention of switching off who gets sung to first every year, but in all the excitement, I completely forgot to tell everyone, so we just sang to them both at the same time. 

Samantha wasn’t too sure about the whole singing thing. 

Amelia wasn’t either. 

It took a little bit of prompting, but I eventually got the girls to try a little bit of frosting, thinking that once they realized this giant pink blob in front of them was edible and super sweet, they’d go crazy over it. 

You want me to EAT this?

Boy, was I wrong! Complete FAIl! The girls were absolutely hysterical with fear/rage/GET ME OUT OF THIS HIGH CHAIR NOW-type sobbing for a solid five minutes before we finally pulled them out. 

It’s MY party and I’LL CRY IF I WANT TO. 

THIS…(SOB)…IS….(SOB)…TERRIBLE…(SOB)…WHERE…(SOB)…ARE…(SOB)…MY…(SOB)…ORGANIC…(SOB)…BLUEBERRIES…(SOB)?

The girls’ reactions were disappointing to say the least, and it took quite a while to get them calmed down after the cake-tastrophe. Fortunately, we saved the smash cakes and snapped some hilarious pictures the next day when they were in better moods (cake smash attempt #2 pictures to come in another post). 

While Jake was calming Samantha and Amelia, the rest of us enjoyed the pink ombre rosette cakes I made, along with strawberry and vanilla ice cream cut into heart shapes. My dad was hoping I would forget all about the ice cream, since I had assigned him the job of cutting out all the hearts. No such luck! 

The cake, one more time, just because it makes me smile:

We waited a while for the twins to wipe away any traumatizing cake smash memories and be happy for opening presents. By the time we finally got around to it, most people had already left. The twins received so many cute outfits, awesome books, and creative gifts, including some cds with Beatles and Coldplay lullabies (LOVE) from the girls’ mentor, Marisa and her mom, Lori, and some personalized name books from Allison and Great Auntie Lynn.  Jake and I even received cash and a few gift cards to restaurants for ourselves…I’m thinking we need to throw more birthday parties, STAT.

Our absolute favorite gift was the tabletop play fort my mom made for the girls. How adorable is this? I have no idea how she made it, but I do know she had been working on it for months. The detail on it is insane!

When all was said and done, Samantha and Amelia’s party was a smashing (minus the the cake smash part) success! What took four days to set up came down in about 45 minutes with everyone’s help. Everyone, that is, except for these two party poopers: 

Sugar coma!

Thank you to everyone who was able to come celebrate with us! We will forever treasure all of our memories from Samantha and Amelia’s big day and everyone who made it possible, from Aunt Sarah capturing all the details of the party in photos, to Grandma tying ribbon on a seemingly endless amount of chocolate heart lollipops, to Grandpa for scraping black char out of my double ovens so that I could get my baking done. It was truly a team effort. Even though it was time-consuming, I loved planning the party and am so happy we were able to celebrate one whole year of life with the girls. I hope they can look back on the pictures from their party one day and wish they could remember it! 

Now that the big ONE is over, on to start planning for next year’s party…

Lots of love, 

I did all the baking two nights before the party (or should I say morning…I didn’t finish baking until 2 a.m!), saran wrapped the cooled layers and stuck them in the fridge to stay moist until I was ready to frost. I didn’t want to frost and bake in the same day, which is why I stayed up all night to get the baking out of the way, the entire time ignoring Jake’s constant comments about how crazy I was and how I needed to go to bed NOW. Thanks for the moral support, babe!

The next day, I leveled the layers of the cake to make them flat, stacked the layers, and applied a crumb coat of frosting all around the cakes to make the rosettes stick. I then made a few batches of white buttercream frosting, and, just like the cake batter, used Wilton food coloring in Rose to dye the frosting three different shades of pink. Then, I loaded three piping bags up with frosting and, using a 1M star tip, added on the rosettes. I watched a YouTube tutorial for the rosettes and after a few practice ones, was pretty efficient. Rosettes are pretty forgiving, so when I messed up, all I had to do was wipe them off and start over. I began with the bottom layer, and basically squeezed frosting out in a circular shape, moving clockwise until I created a rose shape.

Even though frosting the rosettes wasn’t that bad on the difficulty scale, I do NOT want to see piping bags again for a very long time! Frosting two of those cakes burned me out for a while!

In addition to the rosette cake, which was for the guests, I made two giant cupcakes for Samantha and Amelia’s smash cakes. I used Wilton’s awesome giant cupcake pan to bake a strawberry-flavored cake, which I baked the same night/wee hours of the morning as the rosette cake. Needless to say, I was pretty sick of baking after that night!

The next day, I frosted the cupcakes with rosettes using the same frosting I had used for one of the layers of the rosette cake and then added some edible candy flowers. The edible chocolate wrapper is definitely my favorite part of the cupcake and took a few attempts to get it right! After a few fails on my part, Jake saved the day by making two successful chocolate wrappers for me. He melted down some yellow chocolate melts, coated the cupcake pan with Pam, painted the inside of the pan with the melted chocolate, and then stuck it in the fridge to set for a half hour. He then took it out, flipped the pan upside down, tapped it gently, and, like magic, out came the chocolate wrapper! I guess the secret ingredient was using Pam because every time I tried to get the chocolate out, it broke all over the place.

Like I said in my last post, I had all my slaves family members working non-stop to get ready for the party. My mom made these yummy heart-shaped brownies using my silicone heart shaped baking mold and drizzled white chocolate and sprinkles over them. In addition to some food-prep duties, she and my sister were tasked with taking care of the twins while I got the rest of the baking and party prep done. They were pretty exhausted at the end of each day!

A party wouldn’t be complete without cake pops! Fortunately, I have the BabyCakes Cake Pop Maker (yes, there is such a thing, as I had to explain to an incredulous Jake), which made the process a lot easier. Just throw some batter in the machine, let them bake for eight minutes, pull them out using prongs, melt some chocolate, dip a lollipop stick in the chocolate and stick in the cake pops, let them set in the freezer for a few minutes, and then dip the whole thing in more melted chocolate and sprinkles. I made the little cake pop stand topper using Photoshop.

 Warning: The U.S. Surgeon General does not endorse eating any of the products at this table.

 In a perfect world, I would have spray-painted the macaroons pink and gold with some edible spray paint I had, but I completely ran out of time. Sigh. The white chocolate bark hearts didn’t turn out exactly as planned either because I underestimated how big my silicone heart mold was, and the end product turned out way too huge to be appetizing. Who wants to eat an enormous, thick, heart-shaped piece of white chocolate? Well, I guess I do, but not when there were so many other sugar-coma inducing treats around as well. They looked pretty, at least! Fortunately, the silicone heart mold worked a lot better with the brownies.

Thank you to my sweet husband for making the heart pancakes the night before the party with me! We stayed up until 2:30 a.m. making these!  The morning of the party, we re-heated the pancakes in the oven, stuck heart toothpicks through them two at a time, and topped them off with a raspberry. They turned out looking adorable. The best part is, Jake will now be able to make heart-shaped pancakes for me forevermore (hint, hint!)

In the background, you can see the adorable fruit skewers we made by placing grapes on wooden skewers and placing the heart-shaped pieces of watermelon my dad cut for us on top to create a little “wand.” I clearly got some good use out of my heart-shaped cookie cutters!

Not pictured here are the Nutella French Toast Roll-Ups (also made at 2:30 a.m the night before the party), which didn’t turn out looking so great, but were DELICIOUS! Just picture churros oozing with Nutella…yum.

My other favorites from the buffet table were the sun-dried tomato pasta salad my mom threw together and my absolute favorite salad, cranberry spinach salad with poppyseed dressing. Not as satisfying as dessert, in my opinion, but since people probably wanted to eat something else besides pure sugar, they were necessary additions. I would have personally been very happy with two buffet tables of frosting, just of the record.

Anyone want to come over for some lunch and dessert? We are STILL eating leftovers, four days later!

Even more party details to come tomorrow!

Lots of love,

I’m back, and, fortunately, have officially survived pulling off Samantha and Amelia’s “Baby Love” first birthday party! The pink and gold infused party was on Saturday and I couldn’t be more happy (and more sad) that it’s over! The party was months in planning, but that last week was where all of the details came together, meaning some pretty late nights for me and my slaves family who came a few days in advance to help out.

There was absolutely no down time at all last week as I had everyone working on some task or another every second of the day, whether that meant watching the twins so that I could get some baking done, wrapping thirty chocolate heart lollipops in cellophane, running to the grocery store, or cutting out a bazillion hearts out of scrapbook paper. The party seriously wouldn’t have been half-finished if it weren’t for my family, and even though it wasn’t much a vacation for them, I was glad they were here!

That being said, I had so much fun planning and putting together the party, that I’m also sad it’s over, even though it was stressful as it got down to the wire. At least I will have some great photos taken by Aunt Sarah to look back on. That, and my “Twins’ 1st Birthday” Pinterest board I’ve been pinning to for the past six months, will keep me reminiscing for some time to come.

Since I have so many pictures from the big event, I’m dividing up the posts so that the Internet doesn’t explode. Part one is the party decor…enjoy!

The party was held at Great Uncle Steve and Great Auntie Lynn’s house, which was the perfect location for their party, with plenty of indoor and outdoor space. We were so grateful that they let us take over their house for four days…literally…four days! Jake and I arrived late on Wednesday to completely revamp their entire house with all things pink, gold, glitter, hearts, and Samantha and Amelia.

Unfortunately, by Thursday, almost every pom pom and banner we had set up had fallen down since, not wanting to make a million tack holes in their walls, we had originally used tape to hang everything up. In the end, we used tacks anyway, and everything stayed up this time.

By Friday, all of the wall decor was up and it was time to get started on the table decor. I also had my dad and brother making final runs to the grocery store and hauling vases, picture frames and food from my house to Aunt Lynn’s.

Saturday morning, the family was over at the house bright and early (except for Jake and my mom, who were assigned the most important task…making sure Samantha and Amelia went down for their nap on time so that they would be up and rested when the party started). My dad was assigned to pick up the balloons, ice and sandwiches, while the rest of us set up the outside decor, finalized the buffet and dessert tables and made some of the food that had to be done at the last minute.

By 11 a.m., the first guests arrived and everything was ready to go!

My goal when guests walked in was that the “Baby Love” theme and colors of pink and gold would hit them in the face. I hope I succeeded!

We attached some pink polka dotted seamless paper from the deck so it hung down for a photo backdrop. I found some wood photo props, like glasses and mustaches, at Michael’s, which my mom then painted in a whimsical manner!

For the kiddies, I had a t-shirt-making station. I placed a bunch of plain, pink shirts in Samantha and Amelia’s size out, along with fabric markers, fabric paint and iron-on appliques for the kids to decorate the shirts with. This kept the kids busy for a long time!

 Last, but not least, we had TONS of balloons…pink balloons, gold balloons, heart balloons, and giant “one” -shaped balloons. I bought most of the balloons online off bargainballoons.com, which was way cheaper than buying them from the party store. A special thanks to Uncle Mike who was tasked with un-bunching and then re-bunching all 26 of them, since the high-school-aged employees at Party City are notoriously incapable of following directions. No offense if you work at Party City…I can only disparage them because in high school, I worked somewhere similar (Party Land), and I know for a fact that putting together a balloon order correctly is NOT that difficult!  

A few days later and I am STILL finding flecks of gold glitter all over my house. After taking down everything from Aunt Lynn’s, I couldn’t bear to see all of the decor put in storage right away, so almost everything is now hanging up at our house, much to Jake’s chagrin. I just can’t get enough of hearts, pink and gold, I guess.

More on the rest of the party details tomorrow!

Lots of love,