Featured on The TomKat Studio Blog--Our April Fool's Day Party!

I'm delighted to announce that another one of my parties debuted today on The Tomkat Studio blog!  It's an April Fool's day party, full of lots of sweet surprises, and all with a Neapolitan ice cream theme.

Neapolitan Ice Cream themed April Fool's Day party--nothing is quite what it seems!

Head over to the debut post on TomKat, and then come back here tomorrow for my full posts on the party!

Sneak Peek: New Necklace Design!

I'm delighted to present the first glimpse of our newest design.  A necklace with sweet feminine frills but also a bit of edginess.  A statement piece for a bride with panache, not something for a demure, classic bride.

I love the asymmetry, the chunky crystals, the amazing textures from the different types of silver chain and the softness of the tulle.

I can't wait to do a model shoot of this piece with a sleek, strapless gown--maybe with a birdcage veil?

She'll appear on the Tradewind Tiaras website before long.  I just need to figure out her name first.  Any suggestions?

Fabulous Product: Crystal "I Do" Shoe Stickers

I absolutely love the little touches at a wedding.  These clever stickers from Your Happily Ever After definitely qualify:

Rhinestone "I Do" stickers from Your Happily Ever After.

Just stick them on the bottom of your shoe, and don't forget to flash them for your photographer!

I love the idea of using these stickers as the "something blue" in a wedding, but they do come in a wide variety of colors as well.  I don't think I would have been able to resist the purple ones for my wedding, had such clever things been around ten years ago!

Happy Saint Patrick's Day!

Just a quick note to wish everyone a very happy St. Patrick's day.  It's a busy one for us, since this is my daughter's first year performing as an Irish step dancer.

I have very fond memories of St. Patrick's Day from my many years as a step dancer, myself.  The crazy schedule of running around from performance to performance, the enthusiastic crowds, and of course, getting out of school.

Me, somewhere in the late 80s judging by the hair and style of my solo dress, at the Oireachtas (say oh-ROCK-tus, a major regional competition).

 This year, my daughter gets to start making those memories.  And I get to be her chauffeur.  I think I need to put a thank-you call to my mom on today's to-do list.

Our schedule will be back to normal tomorrow.  In the meantime, here's a little sneak peek of a project I completed recently, an April Fool's Day party that will debut on The TomKat Studio.

I'll be sure to mention it here when that post goes live on TomKat!  So excited!

Non Traditional Cakes: The Crepe Cake

When I saw this cake from the Charleston Crepe Company, I was completely smitten.

Tiered crepe cake from the Charleston Crepe Company.

I'd never had a crepe cake until, at The Roaring Fork a few years ago, I tasted an amazing cornmeal crepe cake with caramel filling and fresh bananas.  It was astoundingly good, and I've thought about that dessert many times over the years.   But I never even considered it as a wedding cake option until I saw the Charleston Crepe Company's website.  Brilliant!

It's so lacy, so airy, so pretty, so delicious looking.  And the flavor possibilities are endless!

How about this option, from Martha Stewart Living?

A chocolate hazelnut dream!  Even if you want a more traditional wedding cake, this would make a spectacular groom's cake.

For all that I love making and decorating cakes, I don't like eating them all that much.  But these crepe cakes... these I would enjoy eating!  My birthday?  My upcoming 10th anniversary?  You can bet these will make an appearance on my table soon!

We Love Custom Work! Accessories for a Sweet Pink Baptism

Earlier this year, I had the great delight of working with Suzanne from Fanciful Events, who was in the throes of planning a celebration of her daughter's baptism.  The Vintage Pink Bunny christening party she designed was absolutely exquisite, and we're delighted to have had a small part in helping to put it together!

We at Tradewind Tiaras designed four accessories for the celebration.

The first was a beautiful crown incorporating a Swarovski crystal cross.  We made this one with an open back and built-in loops, so the crown could be connected in the back with a ribbon and adjustable, and worn and enjoyed for many years.  The colors of the party were soft pinks and whites, so we used white silk flowers with pale pink genuine pearl centers and crystal AB Swarovski crystal accents.  (The iridescence of the Aurora Borealis coating on the clear crystals picked up on the pale pinks without screaming PINK!)

We also designed a softer headband with a removable singed flower clip in pale pinks for the guest of honor to wear comfortably through the rest of the party.

And because the guest of honor had an older sister who simply couldn't be left out of the fun, we designed a tiara (based on the tiaras for the Cornish Fairy Party) and a set of singed flower hair clips for her.

I love getting to flex my creative muscles and create custom work!

Be sure you head over to Fanciful Events to see all the details of this gorgeous party.  Its soft palette, sweet bunny theme, and many fabulous details makes it a perfect inspiration for Easter or any spring celebration!

How to: Divinations Class Trick for a Harry Potter Party

I've had several people ask how to do the trick that made Divinations class at the Harry Potter party, and wanted to share.

To create this activity, you'll need:

• clear cups (plastic or glass)
• food coloring
• ice
• clear liquid (we used Sprite)
• a sign describing what each color predicts.

The process is simple.  Well ahead of the party, paint a smudge of food coloring (I like Americolor gel food colorings) on the bottom of each cup and let dry.

At the party, fill a cup with some ice (to cover the smudge of food coloring) and place it in a child's outstretched hands.  Show them how to hold their hands out on front of themselves.  

It feels strange and mystical, and is the perfect misdirection to prevent them from having any chance of seeing the food coloring on the bottom of the cup.  I suppose you could use an opaque cup, but then the end result wouldn't be nearly as dramatic.

Have the child concentrate on her future, then add the clear liquid.

The Sprite activates the food coloring at the bottom of the cup, and like magic, the girl's future is revealed!

Watching the wonder and delight on their faces was my favorite part of the Harry Potter party!

This could be adapted for a fun April Fool's day party, a magic party, a fairy party, or anything where you want to add a little bit of fun and surprise.  

How to Make Chocolate Popcorn

Here's a fun DIY project I learned from Paulette and the Harry Potter party.  Sweet and salty and oh-so-simple chocolate popcorn.  With so many colors of candy melts, you can be sure that this treat is going to make an appearance on many of my dessert tables in the future.   For the Harry Potter party, of course, we put it in a plastic cauldron I use at Halloween and called them Troll Boogers.

Ingredients for Chocolate Covered Popcorn:

• Chocolate (the candy melts variety is fine, doesn't need tempering, and comes in a rainbow of colors)
• Popcorn
• Salt, if desired

How to Make Chocolate Covered Popcorn:

First, pop the popcorn.  I just used  microwave popcorn, mostly because I have an electric stove, and can't make stovetop popcorn on an electric stove to save my life.  Be sure you pick out all of the unpopped kernels, and put the popcorn in a large bowl.  Ideally, the popcorn should only fill half of the bowl.

Next melt your chocolates.  I use disks of candy melts I get from my local cake decorating store, but Wilton makes them, too, and they're widely available in craft stores in a rainbow of colors.

The best way to met chocolate is with a double boiler, but with chocolate melts like these, you can be a lot more carefree.  No tempering needed, no double boiler, just throw it in the microwave for about a minute.  After a minute, check to see if the chocolate disks have melted.  

Be aware that the disks won't have melted into a puddle when they're ready.  No, they hold their shape but look shiny when they're ready.  Look for the shine and give it an experimental poke with your spatula to see if the candy is melted.

If you still have some solid chunks, throw it back in the microwave, checking every 15 seconds or so.  You don't want to microwave for too long!  And remember that water is your enemy when working with chocolate, so be sure that your bowl and spatula are perfectly dry before starting.

As a side note, some colors of chocolate melts seem to melt a lot better than others.  I have terrible luck with oranges, for example.  So if you're having trouble with a particular color, feel free to blame the chocolate instead of yourself.

Next, it's time to mix.  Just dollop the melted chocolate on top of the popcorn, and toss, just like you would a salad.

Sprinkle with salt, if desired.  I always desire salt.  That sweet and salty combination is just so good.

Once the popcorn is completely coated, throw the bowl in the fridge to solidify the melted chocolate quickly.  Once it has hardened, take the popcorn out of the fridge and store at room temperature.

Chocolate popcorn can be made several days in advance, because the chocolate coating helps to keep the popcorn from going stale.  It's the perfect addition to a dessert table, makes fabulous homemade wedding favors or an addition to goodie bags for parties or for out of town guests.  Try customizing the flavors by throwing in peanuts or mini marshmallows (or both!  Rocky Road Popcorn!).  Thanks, Paulette, for the recipe!

Real Parties: A Harry Potter Extravaganza--Part 2, The Celebration

In yesterday's post, I showcased the dessert table for the Harry Potter Party my friend Paulette planned for her daughter, Mikayla.   Today, I'm going to give you a glimpse of Paulette's party planning brilliance, and show you how incredibly fun and creative the party was.

The party was scheduled to run for four hours, and I have to say, we needed every minute of that time.  There was so much to do, and the kids stayed occupied and delighted for every minute of the celebration, and left wanting more.  Now that's an  impressive testament to how well the party was planned!

Paulette created some amazing thematic centerpieces to decorate the tables and set the scene for the guests:

And I loved all the little touches, like the sign on the gate to the stairs:

I always like having an activity for the kids to jump into at the beginning of the party, to occupy their attention while the rest of the guests are arriving.  I'd stumbled across this tutorial for making charming felt owls, so I suggested that we have the kids make their own familiars.  It was a bonus that I had tons of felt on hand and had bought way too many Styrofoam balls for the Cornish Fairy Party.  A few googlie eyes and some glue and we had the perfect craft project!

Once all the kids had arrived and finished making the craft, it was time for the party to start in earnest.  Mikayla, the 11 year old birthday girl, had spent weeks carving wands for each guest.  They were perfect, beautiful, and such a marvelous personal touch for her party!

Paulette also created booklets for each child, with information about Hogwarts, potions recipes, and most importantly, their class schedules.  It was a large party, so the guests were broken down into four groups, each with different class schedules, to keep them moving around to the different stations and entertained through the course of the party.

For the first class, everyone went together to Herbology.  Rain threatened that night (I know!  Here in Phoenix, can you imagine?), so we moved it into the garage.  The girls planted basil seeds and decorated their pots with glitter paint.  Doing this class first gave the pots plenty of drying time so they'd be ready to take home at the end of the evening.

After Herbology, the kids broke down into their different groups, and followed separate class schedules.

They had Transmogrophy class--shrinky dinks!.  Did you know you could buy sheets of plain shrinky dink material at the craft store?  Neither did I, but I'm sure going to remember it!  The girls loved making key chains in this class.

They also had Potions class, in which they followed potion recipes in their class booklets, and then had fun improvising their own mixtures:

My favorite class had to be Divinations.  It was just so fun, cool, and dramatic an activity.  First, the kids were given a clear cup with ice and were told to concentrate on their futures:

Then, Sprite was poured in each cup...

...and the clear liquid magically turned a color, predicting the girl's future!

Look at the expressions on their faces!

Such earnest concentration!

Skepticism...

...and amazement!

There was also a Defense Against the Dark Arts class, which, sadly, I didn't capture a very good picture of the entire party.  But it was a huge hit, too!  The girls went out on the back porch (dark!  Hard to focus in extremely low light, even with my fastest glass.) and were each given a film canister.  A half an Alka-Seltzer was put in each canister, and then the girls poured warm water in and snapped on the lid.  The canister was quickly placed upside down on the ground, and a few seconds later, the pressure in the canister got so high that it popped apart and rocketed from the ground.  Dramatic and easy!  The kids begged to do it over and over.  But no matter how many times they did it, between the dark and not knowing when the canister would go off, I never managed to get a picture of more than a fizzy contrail.

Cheezy Weasley pizza was served for dinner (with pepperoni stars cut out by the birthday girl), and of course we had a selection of punches.  We served Butter Beer, Pumpkin Juice, and Polyjuice, and I got to use my favorite three-tiered punch dispenser.  ;-)  Of course my twinkling submersible beverage lights made another appearance at this magical party.

Butter Beer, Pumpkin Juice, and Polyjuice drinks for the Harry Potter party.

Of course, the crowning event of the evening was the cake, complete with its trick candles:

Congratulations, Paulette!  You created an incredible party for your daughter, full of memories that will last a lifetime.  Thanks for letting me have a small part in the fun!

Real Parties: A Harry Potter Extravaganza--Part 1, the Dessert Table

I was delighted and honored to get to assist my friend Paulette throw a Harry Potter birthday party for her 11 year old daughter, Mikayla.  A few weeks before the party, we got together for a brainstorming session, and it sent something like this:

Paulette:  So here are all the ideas I have for the games, decor, etc..
Me: Sounds amazing!  So...um...what exactly are we supposed to be brainstorming when you already have an incredible party planned?

Paulette already had an astoundingly fun and well thought out party already in mind, but she graciously let me jump in and have fun helping with the dessert table.  Paulette is a great cake decorator already, so we arranged cake play-dates.  The girls played and had a great time, the moms played and had a great time, and in the end, we had a fabulous sweets display that could rival Honeydukes Sweet Shop any day.

This cake had more than its fair share of mishaps.  Let me just say that making those stacked book cakes turns out to be way harder than it looks.  We had to switch our design concept around on the fly the morning we started decorating based on the amount of fondant that we'd made, too.  But I ended up loving having the two separate cakes on two different levels.  And we managed to fool a few people into thinking that the stacked books on the bottom were real books (at least for a moment), so I consider that a job well done!

Harry Potter Party Dessert Table

The whole dessert table, before the owl arrived with one of the guests.  The wooden desk on the table (holding the open book cake) is actually a table designed to hold dog food bowls (very well cleaned, of course!).  And I recycled the rustic wooden cake stand I made for the Cornish fairy party to act as a perch for the stuffed owl prop. The container for the Berti Botts Every Flavor Beans came from the stash I bought for our annual gingerbread house decorating party.   The tablecloths are the same purple velvet curtains I used at the Sugar Plum Fairy party.  I love recycling and finding uses for things already in the house!

You can hardly tell that I broke the quill while I was trying to paint it, and had to glue it back together with royal icing!

Golden snitch cake pops

One of my favorite elements on the dessert table was the tray of golden snitch cake pops.  They were a little fussy to make, but I loved the way they turned out!

Acid Pops from the Harry Potter Birthday Party

Actually, the golden snitch pops and the acid pops ended up living on the beverage table.  We made too many sweets to fit on just one of the four foot tables we were using.  ;-)

Chocolate covered popcorn.

My favorite item on the dessert table (at least to eat!) was the chocolate covered popcorn, also known as a cauldron full of troll bogeys.  This is a good shot of the faux wax seals I made for the party.  I originally made them for the scroll invitations (you can see one next to the open book cake), but I forgot to put them in my daughter's backpack for the at-school hand-off on the correct day, and Paulette cleverly improvised wax seals with a crayon, a button, and a glue gun.  The seals I made made lovely accents to the dessert table labels.

Harry Potter Cookies

I have very high expectations for myself when I make cookies.  I somehow think that they should be as astounding as Sweetopia's, or Sweetapolita's, or SugarBelle's.  I conveniently forget that I haven't been honing my cookie skills for very long, that when I was at this stage of experience in cake decorating, I sucked (not that I knew it at the time).  I doubt and I worry excessively.  But somehow, by the time I put on the finishing touches, I love them.  Sure, they're not quite as perfect as those made by the cookie superstars.  I have plenty of room for practice and learning.  But I'm having fun and getting better each time I try.  And when they're done, with a shimmer of super pearl luster spray and disco dust accents, even I am happy.  Sparkle distracts beautifully and can cover a lot of mistakes.  ;-)

Broomstick cookies

A little hard to tell in this shot, but I used a food coloring marker to draw wood graining on the broomstick handles.  It looked fabulous!

Owl cookies.

Sorting Hat Cookies

Bertie Botts Every Flavor Beans, of course!

Chocolate Owl Pops

The girls had a wonderful time helping us make the chocolate owls lollipops and chocolate frogs!  It's a great way for kids to help out with the party prep, and a popular sweet on the table.

Chocolate Frogs

A little bit of green disco dust gave our chocolate frogs just the right bit of magical sparkle!

Be sure to come back for tomorrow's post with all the details of the fabulous activities and fun had by all at the party.