Pandamonium - Part 2

21^st Birthday

It may not be my 6^th birthday but I can still have fun party food for my birthday if I want to!

  

So as my birthday was on the 28^th February my Mum and I decided to try and make panda cupcakes as mentioned in my previous post.

We didn’t stick to one recipe in particular but instead used ideas from what we had seen online and in the Hello, Cupcake! recipe book and made a mixture of panda heads and full size pandas.  

This is what we used:

Standard cupcake mix – When mixing this with the electric mix my Mum had not learnt her lesson from making reindeer cakes and we ended up with the mixture exploding all over the kitchen again!

Butter icing – To cover the cupcakes. The Hello, Cupcake! recipe recommends using vanilla frosting; however we could not find any ready-made frosting in our supermarket so had to make our own. The only problem with this was that our icing was more yellow than we would have liked because of the butter used. So our panda’s fur was a rather off-white!

Marshmallows – Hello, Cupcake! recommends sticking mini marshmallows to the top of the cupcakes with the icing to create a point for where the panda’s nose goes and then cover the marshmallow with frosting when covering the rest of the top of the cake.

Oreos cut in half – For the ears.

Poppets – For the noses.

Piped black icing – We used black food colouring to make the icing for the mouth and eyes.

Chocolate chips – For the eyes.

Piped white icing – For the eyes and claws.

Mini cupcakes – For the heads of the full size pandas

Crushed Oreos – For the fur on the body of the full size panda as suggested in Hello, Cupcake!

Chocolate buttons – For the ears of the full size pandas.

Here’s how they turned out:

We also added decorations to make them into a proper birthday cake and of course grass, for the authentic 'panda in the wild' look!

Although, these cakes are not featured in any children’s books you could take inspiration from a children’s picture book based on animals for a party theme as there are many out there. For example:

Elmer by David McKee

Frog by Max Velthujis

The Very Hungry Caterpillar by Eric Carle

Monkey and Me by Emily Gravatt

Michaela Strachan’s Really Wild Adventures by Michaela Strachan

Using the different animals kids discover in picture books you could have a zoo or farm themed party and have a different food based around each animal such as rainbow biscuits in parrot shapes, sandwiches cut into elephant shapes and the possibilities to make cupcakes with any animal are endless as presented in the Hello, Cupcake! recipe book. Having an animal theme for a young child’s party would also help with their learning of how to identify the different animals and their names which is often taught in picture books. This shows how children's literature can be used as inspiration for the food created for kids and can be educational too.