Pink! Pink! Pink! Birthday (Part 2)

This is my second of two posts about my daughter's PINK themed birthday party! It was so much fun to plan, and very easy on the wallet since we didn't have to buy any of those expensive character balloons, plates and napkins. 

In the first post, I showed the pink cookies that went on the dessert table. 

I didn't have much time to plan for the dessert table...so I tried to keep things simple. The beauty of planning a party theme around a color is that it doesn't take much imagination for things to come together.

You probably have heard of the four 'Cs' of diamonds (cut, clarity, something, and something else). Well, I followed the three 'Cs' of dessert tables.There were the cookies of course.

And some candy... I found these neat apothocary jars at Michaels craft store. I think they had a little more character than the average candy dish. Using the 40% off coupon they email me once a week (you can get it too if you join their email list), I didn't spend much on them at all. I'm sure I'll find many more uses for them in the future too!

I bought Strawberry Whoppers, red fish, pink wintergreen mints, Twizzlers and candy bracelets.

The final 'C' is for cupcakes.

I made chocolate and strawberry cupcakes with vanilla buttercream. I made regular and mini sized cupcakes. Those minis were POP-ular! Get it? Pop, like pop it in your mouth, yum yum. They were the first to go on the cupcake tower.

I had an assistant for the decorating! She was quite good.

I let her decorate ALL the cupcakes. To keep the sprinkle mess to a minimum, I set up a cute little cupcake tray using one of her plates. She loved it! I poured the sprinkles in the different compartments and then I didn't need to worry about an entire container being used on one cupcake alone.

We love sprinkles, so we mixed it up a little bit with some jumbo pastel round sprinkles, pink sugar crystals, a pink/purple/white medley, and some pink and white hearts.

Also on the table, I put light and dark pink favor bags. These were available for the to-go goodies - candies and cookies.

Plus for a little festive fun, we made pink lemonade with lemon slices.

If there would have been a pink fish in the bowl...this would have been her view of the table.

We invited our guests to play along and dress in pink. Many of the presents were pink too!

We used pink table clothes and decorated with pink balloons and streamers.

The weather was perfect that day! Quite a change from the very rainy 1st birthday party a few years ago. This was one happy birthday girl. She was so appreciative. When we were all finished decorating and setting up she gave me a big hug and said, "Thank you for the beautiful party." What a sweet girl.

We served lunch too. Homemade ham and bean soup, sloppy turkey joes, Alton Brown's recipe for mac and cheese, homemade hummus and olive tapenade with thinly sliced baguette bread, watermelon and cantaloupe slices, and a very veggie salad. Oh, and of course there were chips. I cannot throw a party without chips  It was delicious, but sorry, no pictures of the food display. By the time everything was set up and it was party time, I wanted to enjoy the company and not worry about photos. Next time I'll try to do a better job.

I hope you have a very sweet day!

Anne