jordyn's dinosaur birthday party!

So if any of you lovely readers were with us last year...you might remember Jordyn's epic moustache party!  Well, this year she decided that she wanted a dinosaur theme, and we had so much fun coming up with quirky details to make her party special. 

We really really like food.  And we really really like baking.  So naturally we may have gone a bit overboard in the food department, but we didn't hear anyone complaining. haha.  

We used chocolates and candy to represent "dino poop and dino eggs", labelled the drinks table the "watering hole", and had tons of fruits and veggies to go around. 

Jordyn made rainbow cupcakes using the same technique we used for our camo cupcakes, and they turned out fantastic!  I also decorated some fancy dino cookies for as well, and was pretty pleased with how they turned out!

We covered the picnic tables with simple kraft paper, and let people go to town drawing dinos, doodling, and writing messages to Jordyn.  There were also a few silly stations set up, including "What would a Jordynasaurus look like?", grow your own dinos, and several 3-D dino puzzles.

And of course it wouldn't be a party without bunting.  Jordyn made this by stenciling a dino on each triangle of bunting, and then she coloured them all in!  It took a lot of work, but it looked so cute.

Jordyn has the sweetest friends, and received the best presents!   All in all, it was a pretty epic night!

p.s.  ♥ kelsey & jordyn

diy : chalk & craft paper photobooth backdrop

The month of May was a pretty special time for us Hildebrands - we celebrated both mine and Caleb's birthdays, got to visit Korea, and I graduated with my Bachelor of Arts! To make our party day special & fun, I made a DIY photobooth at our home to goof off with our friends :)

All you need to make this photobooth backdrop is a roll of kraft paper, some chalk, and a roll of tape. Altogether this project cost me around $3 and it only took me around 15 minutes to put it together!

Here's what you do: tape your sheets of kraft paper to your designated photobooth wall, then start writing whatever it is that you want! I chose to simply repeat the lyrics of "Happy Birthday" over and over again to fill my wall and simply tried using different fonts.

To liven it up, I strung up a line of balloons, made a really easy tissue paper fringe garland, and tacked up a lace tablecloth as well. And voila, you've got yourself a super lovely, personal photobooth backdrop for your party!

p.s.  ♥ clara

sushi cake!

One of Jordyn's friends had requested a sushi cake as her birthday present, and we were very excited (and quite nervous) to take up the challenge!

Now all of the credit for this amazing idea goes to the super talented blogger Heather, from Sprinklebakes!

Her blog was one of the very first food blogs I discovered, EVER!  And was actually the reason why I started blogging in the first place!

HERE is where you can find the recipe for these wonderful matcha sushi rolls!

Essentially, you make a matcha sponge cake in a 9x13 (like you would bake a jelly roll), fill it with buttercream, and VERY GENTLY roll it up!

Then, you pop it in the freezer to set, and once it's firm you can start slicing!

Now, we found that our roll wasn't quite perfectly circular...so we just gently molded each roll into shape.

Orange sprinkles were used to represent roe....and then we also sliced up some cantaloupe, as well as used a few pomegranate seeds to represent tuna and roe respectively.

We also used edible green paper (which we found in the baking aisle of Michaels) as our faux grass, and green butter cream icing for our wasabi.  Jordyn rolled out several pink starbursts and then molded them to represent ginger!  And finally, we used chocolate as our "soy sauce".

We also made a giant California Roll cake out of a two-tiered chocolate cake!

{Side Note: Now, I want to say that the jelly roll is definitely NOT for beginner bakers.  A lot can go wrong, and even Jordyn and I had a bit of trouble rolling ours without too much cracking occurring.  And it takes a VERY long time!  I would definitely recommend our faux California roll if you're a newbie...it's MUCH easier!}

We covered the entire thing with a crumb coat of butter cream to start out with, and let the cake chill.  Then we added a thin layer of butter cream only to the sides of the cake, and very quickly and CAREFULLY pressed green edible paper on top.  (We measured our edible paper, and trimmed it to the height of our cake beforehand.)

We used large flake coconut for the "rice", shredded coconut dyed pink (using gel dye) for the "crab", and honeydew as the "cucumber".  

Everything was a hit at the party, and Jordyn and I are so happy to have been able to try out something so adventurous!

p.s. ♥ kelsey + jordyn