A Wintery 1st Birthday

My adorable nephew Corey just celebrated his 1st birthday. While we weren’t able to be in Canada and celebrate with them, his mom Deanna sent along some photos. I knew I had to share them with you so you could see a 1st birthday through the eyes of a new mommy. Enjoy!

This past December we celebrated our son’s first birthday! I was pretty darn excited to plan for this event; I think I started designing the invitations in October!

Seeing that our Champ wasn’t really into anything in particular, I had thought a winter themed party would be appropriate and fun. We had decided to only invite family members to keep it somewhat intimate and hopefully not too overwhelming for Corey.

The planning went pretty well. We had established the menu and cake in advance so no need to stress, right? Wrong! Stress is a funny little beast. Having never really decorated a cake before I would highly recommend not piping a cake the day of the party!! Lesson learned for next year.

The finished product! This occasion was my first attempt at making a cake and ‘piping’ a cake…how hard could it be, really? Ace of Cakes makes it look easy….yah, well I’m no Duff Goldman and my first cake looked a bit rookie..practice makes perfect I guess. I made a banana cake in the shape of the #1 with cream cheese icing. It was pretty delicious actually ( I’m hoping the taste made up for the presentation).

We were debating on putting up a ‘Happy Birthday’ sign and decided that this one would be perfect. Everyone would see it and it would be subtle at the same time.

The Smörgåsbord. Seeing as we had decided on a winter themed party, we thought it would be fitting if we served up food that somewhat complimented our theme. Candies, chocolates and finger foods were high on our menu list.

I’d have to say the most fun (and maybe the most delicious) treat on our table was the pine-cone-shaped-roasted-almond-cream-cheese-bacon-dill-pickle dip. You may think that food combination is a bit crazy, but all I’d say to that is don’t knock it until you try it. I think this presentation made up for the cake.

A fun spin put on your run of the mill regular rice krispie square. The only downfall would be the base product is not like cookie dough so you can’t re-use the treat base once you’ve cut your shape out. I tried and the rice krispie pieces cracked and crumbled.

Our winter themed party sported a hot chocolate and apple cider bar. I had read about this idea on a website and thought it was a fantastic one. I mean who doesn’t like chocolate and when you can add marshmallows, whipped cream and more chocolate to it, it’s like heaven in a mug!

Ultimate cake test. After singing Happy Birthday, we divvied up the cake and gave Corey his first piece ever! He studied it for about 2 seconds and then devoured it … with both hands! He didn’t stop plowing the cake into his mouth until he was finished.