Ria's Collection: Kids parties

Saturday, September 29, 2018

BIRTHDAY UPDATES!

Hello everyone,hope you all are doing good! Every time I tell you guys that I will be regular here, I end up doing just the opposite! We were in Kannur for the whole of Summer and got back about a month ago. While we were there, I was literally buried in orders for my Doughnuts, Brownies,Jams, Cakes & Desserts! It was a lot of fun and work. I got to meet a lot of you this time when you came to pick up your orders, at various Malls, at Supermarkets etc. It felt really good to put a face to your name!

Before we left for Kannur, Jobin & I celebrated our birthday's in the month of May. We baked each others cakes, like we do every year. The kids were really excited about it, more than us actually. There's something about cake cutting & candle blowing for them and of course, for us. Turing a year older with my beloved family around was definitely the best way to celebrate my birthday! For his birthday, I baked a Fresh Pineapple Cream Cake with a naked cake style appearance of sorts. And for mine,they baked a moist Yellow Cake with Chocolate Buttercream. This year, I was actually home for my birthday,so we celebrated mine a few days early,before we left. :-)

While we were in Kannur, we celebrated Ian's 6th Birthday. It was a small birthday party with a few of my niece's & nephew's. Ian wanted a Mario cake this time and I was pretty sure that we will not get anything related to that in Kannur. So I carried a few things along with us when we went home. Jobin had come down around Ian's birthday and we travelled extensively and reached Kannur a day before his birthday. So basically, I had only one day to prep and host the birthday party. The menu was designed around what Ian enjoyed the most. Since Amma was around to help with everything, it was such a breeze. The only person I can work smoothly with, is Amma. No one else understands my workflow or how I think in my head!

Menu for Ian's Birthday

Mario Birthday Cake

(Chocolate cake with Chocolate Buttercream)

Guava Punch

Monaco with Onion & Garlic topping

BBQ Chips

Chicken Lasagna

Batura

Chicken Ghee Roast

Channa Masala

My little brother Ritchie, now works in Dubai and was home for a month while we were home. So we all got to spend some quality time together and the kids had a great time having their Uncle around them. His birthday is on September 25th and since he would be spending it alone, I felt like celebrating his day while we were together. So I made a Chocolate cake layered with cream cheese frosting, covered with Nutella buttercream and finally covered with Chocolate Ganache with little swirls of Nutella buttercream on top. When Appa asked me the name of the cake, I was lost and he was like,' If you needed to make this again,do you know how?'. I nodded in agreement! :-)

Then when we got back home in Minneapolis, I started planning for Zara's 2nd birthday party. I knew I wanted it to be a Tea Party,so Tea Party it was! We had a bunch of our good friends over and Zara had a really nice time! There were a lot of kids this time,which is always a good idea, so the noise level was really high with joyful screams & laughs! We have a life size playhouse in our backyard and therefore, most of the kids were playing inside it. The weather also co-operated so all in all, it was a spectacular day!

Menu for Zara's Tea Party

Teddy Bear Cake

(Vanilla Cake with Vanilla Buttercream)

Madeleines

Strawberry Cheesecake Macarons

Glazed Orange Scones

Sausage Rolls

French Onion Puffs

Cucumber Cream Cheese Bites

Egg Salad Tea Sandwiches

Waldorf Chicken Tea Salad Sandwiches

Malabar Chatti Pathiri Bites

Stuffed Paneer Buns

Peach Iced Tea

Passionfruit Lemonade

It really feels good to come back here and share some photographs and updates about our life in general. Ian is in First Grade this year and loves going to school. Zara is one talkative child! She speaks non stop, fluent Malayalam so it's so much fun to have her around during the day while Ian is in school. She is a big helper and loves to do the chores I give her around the house. If you really like to catch upon more about us, please follow me on Instagram where I share a LOT of snippets from our daily lives!

I hope you all had a fabulous Summer and is ready for FALL! It's been a really cold day here today. Brr!

Tuesday, October 24, 2017

BIRTHDAY UPDATES !

So here I am,almost 2.5 months after my last post. Where did I go? I was right here,still cooking and taking photos and literally living every minute on my Instagram account. So all of you who miss reading the updates/ recipes here,head on over to Instagram and click 'follow'! It's been really really busy all these weeks with the house shifting, house parties and travel. I could really squeeze in time to come and post recipes here but I chose not to. To keep my sanity in check. This week,there's nothing much going on for me, so that's how I finally reached here!

This is going to be a short post and I am going to share a few pictures from Ian's 5th birthday (July 22) & Zara's 1st birthday (September 16). They both were 100% homemade parties. Ian's party was barely a week before we moved and Zara's was about a month and a half after we moved. Her party was our deadline to set up our new home. Since we moved in from a single bedroom condominium to a 5 bedroom house, we had TONS to do. We are still shopping for stuff and I have no idea when this will end :) Anyway, I hope you enjoy their party photos!

Also in the meantime,this blog baby of mine turned 9 years old on October 8th. To be honest, that totally skipped my mind since I was busy with other things.But. There's something new brewing up and I will be making an announcement here this week! If you scroll through my Instagram profile, you can find that out! :-)