Frozen Birthday Party

We jumped on the Frozen bandwagon around here like in so many houses across the nation, a had a Frozen inspired birthday party for my 2 oldest daughters. They love acting out scenes from Frozen, and my oldest is always Elsa while my middle child is always Anna (and my poor baby gets to be Olaf).

When I looked around for ideas and inspiration for the cake I saw so many Elsa-inspired cakes, but very little Anna (I don't know why everyone is so in to Elsa more than Anna? Sure, Elsa gets to be queen and all, but Anna gets the guy;). I wanted to make this a cake that represented both my girls, so I decided to do the bottom tier representing the rosemaling in Anna's dress while the top tier would represent Elsa's shimmery icy blue dress. Anna's dress pattern was pretty simple to do with some colored royal icing and a band of fondant around the bottom. I loved how it turned out.

Next came Elsa's tier. I have been dying to try out both an inverted fondant frill technique as well as an ombre coloring technique, so this was my big chance. After coloring fondant different shades of blue to white, I cut out long strips, thinned one long edge with my ball and vein tool, and attached them from the top working down on the cake. All that was left was sticking in some clear crystal rock candy on the top to represent Elsa's ice castle, and then putting Elsa and Anna on the top together (thanks to my daughter's clippy doll collection, I didn't have to try to mold these out of modeling chocolate. Whew!).

The final result--a Frozen birthday cake fit for my 2 little princesses. They were so excited when they saw it.

The cake was the focal point of the food table. I got some snowflakes at the dollar store that I used around on the table and to act like clips on the swagged tablecloth and drapery above the table. Good grief, someone hand me an iron! Looks like I overlooked ironing the white table cloth before the party. I guess ironing was the last of my concerns when putting this party together.

We kept the food pretty simple this year--the party started after lunch time so all the kids weren't too hungry. We just had a few Frozen inspired snacks to go along with the cake:

•  Melted Snowmen--water bottles
• Anna's Snowballs--powdered doughnuts
• Warm Hugs/Kisses to Melt a Frozen Heart--Hershey's hugs and kisses--I loved that I found these in blue (cookies n cream), purple (dark chocolate), and silver (hugs) to match the party!
• Kristoff"s Ice Cubes--blue jello jiggler cubes
• Sven's Antlers--pretzels
• Olaf's Noses--carrots

It just so happened that my January decorations consisted of lots of blue and silver Christmas ornaments, so I pulled those out and put them on the table, around the room, hung giant paper snowflakes from the ceiling (leftover from a church party I made them for a couple of years ago--I knew I should save them for a reason, and now I know why!), and hung our snowflake wreath on the door to welcome everyone to Elsa's ice castle.

There are our Queen Elsa, Princess Anna, and Olaf with the wreath in the background. I used this tutorial to make the Olaf costume--it is a great tutorial and very easy and quick to make. Much better than my first attempt. Ahem...let's not talk about what an utter disaster that was, and the hours and hours I wasted trying to get layer upon layer of white tulle to somehow look like a rolly polly snowman. That got tossed in the project fail pile.

The party itself was full of fun games such as

• Do you want to build a Snowman using marshmallows, pretzels, and chocolate chips
• Pin the carrot on Olaf (I taped it up on our sliding door so ignore the bright glare coming through from behind the paper).
• Do you want to build a Snowman--toilet paper around kids to make them look like snowmen
• Freeze Tag
• Freeze Dance

No pictures of the last 2 but you get the idea--the classic Freeze Tag game where one person is it and when they tag you, you freeze until someone else crawls under your legs. With Freeze Dance we turned on some Frozen music and let the kids dance around the room, freezing every time the music stopped.

Before sending the kids home after games, food, and presents, they were sent on a little Frozen Scavenger Hunt which led them around the house until they found their Olaf goodie bags with some Frozen items inside.

There are so many fun ideas out there of items to put in the goodie bag. Here are the ones that I used:

• More Olaf hugs and Kisses to Melt a Frozen Heart.
• Frozen Stickers
• Crystal rock candy sucker (like on the cake)
• Bubbles (I thought this fit--reminds me of when she melts everything at the end and the water all floats up like bubbles)
• blue and purple chocolate coins
• Glow stick necklace--I put a little tag on it that said "Troll Fire Crystal"

We are glad that Elsa controlled her powers and didn't freeze us all that day. She did manage to use them to put out her's and Anna's candles on the cake. Happy birthday to these 2 beautiful princesses.

And since their birthdays are just the week before Halloween, we multipurposed their costumes for that too...

and Chris and I joined in as Sven and a rock troll. No one could figure out who I was supposed to be when we were out trick or treating. Oh well. I tried. Happy Halloween from our home to yours.