Carnival Birthday Party Food

I have a lot of ideas to share with you today as I clean up the remainders of Enzo's birthday party. Our son turned 3 and we had a fun day celebrating his birthday with lots of his buddies from preschool, Family Student Housing, and Church. The theme was Carnival and I wanted to create a menu that was simple for me to make and also simple for the kids to eat. Here are some of the things I came up with.

I made rice krispie treats and cut them out into bite sized squares. I then covered them with sprinkles just to add some color. I used the traditional rice krispie treats recipe and made one modification. Instead of using 6 cups rice krispies cereal I used 5 cups. I like it when it's a bit more chewey. Plus, I made these the day before so I knew it woul be harder the next day anyway.

I made my recipe of apple peanut butter crunch and I used the granola recipe I shared with you a little while back. I wanted to make something healthy-ish and I think this is a good healthy and easy to make treat. To be totally honest I had plenty of rice krispie treats left and no apples. I also set it up on a cutting board which made it easy for the kids to access.

My son is addicted to popcorn and it's a fun carnival food so I borrowed a popcorn popper from a friend.

Popcorn is so easy to make, especially with a popcorn popper. It was s success because mainly the kids just wanted to play in the park and they liked walking around with their popcorn baggies and being able to set it down by the swings.

The mini veggie hamburgers and cheese burgers were my favorite because it was the easiest to make. I bought Morning Star vegetarian sausage patties at costco and Hawaiian sweet rolls. I had to warm up the patties for 7 minutes in the oven which gave me plenty of time to cut the bread. I put the patties in the bread, a slice of cheese and voila!

We also made homemade mini pig-in-a-blanket. I basically just wrapped half of a hotdog with bread dough and baked for 15 minutes. I used my Easy Roll recipe for this.

I decided to make little place cards to identify all the food mainly for fun. You can find free fonts for this kind of stuff here. 

  

Since the theme of the party was Carnival we had some easy games for the kids to play if they want to and then as prizes/goodie bags I let the kids fill a baggie with each of the prizes above. I'm usually against goodie bags because by the end of the party they're already all sugared up and then the goodie bag is full of candy. So I went to the dollar store instead and loaded up on some little plastic toys. I wanted to give the kids (and parents) a chance to put whatever they wanted in their goodie bags so as not to get a bunch of random toys they'll never play with. No one wanted pencils but they all liked the rubber insects and the platic rings which I thought no one would want was a hit with the girls and the boys.

The highlight of the menu (and the party) was the awesome train cake that Christian made. I'm glad he's the baker around here because I am no good at making cakes.

Happy birthday Enzo!