Jenson's 4th birthday party

Note to self--and everyone else in the world: Betty Crocker Sugar Cookies do not hold their shape, as evident below.

Thankfully I've had this experience before with sugar cookies, so I simultaneously made this recipe from scratch that turned out perfectly. For Jenson's birthday this year we rented a wet/dry combo water slide and moonbounce. I went with the water theme and made shark cookies(design ideas courteous of Bridget at Bake at 350), a shark cake, shark-shaped peanut butter and jelly sandwiches, etc. The most time consuming part was the cookies. Here's my step-by-step process. I made the cookies as mentioned above, then I practiced drawing the shark on paper.

That didn't go so well but I forged ahead with making the royal icing and practicing my borders on saran wrap. Once I had drawn 2 pretty ugly sharks, I said, "what the hell, it's 10pm!" and went ahead and drew the borders on the rest of my circle cookies. Then I thinned my royal icing and flooded the borders like so:

I added gills, teeth and eyes, then I was done with my sharkies! I did the same thing with starfish, and since the sharks were chasing the starfish, presumably to chomp them into smithereens, I removed an arm of each starfish before I baked them.

Jenson's party had very small turn-out; probably because even though I ordered the invitations 2 months in advance, I got it into my head that I had to make my own coordinating envelopes. Since that was a ridiculous idea and I had no time for it, the supplies sat around my kitchen for 5 weeks until the week before the party when I realized I had to tell people about this party or nobody was going to come. We had less than 10 kids, but by the time people left we had half the neighborhood kids over.

Jenson's cake was a blue ombre cake. I made vanilla cake and colored the icing with Americolor Blue. The frosting was a Lemon Swiss Meringue Buttercream that I colored with Americolor Blue and Black. I topped it with my dried royal icing practice shark and starfish, then I piped starfish with my leftover icing around the bottom. (By the way, I can't figure out why this picture is sideways. It's not sideways in my picture folder. It's almost midnight, and I'm not fixing it.)

I'm not sure who had more fun, Jenson or Matt.

Funny story: Jenson disappeared with his friend Connor and when I went searching for them, I found all of Jenson's opened gifts strewn around the livingroom. These little turds opened all of his presents while nobody was there and mixed everything up! I took a picture and I plan on putting one in each thank you card, explaining why I have no idea what they got Jenson but thanks for coming to our party!

It was a long 3-day preparation for this party, but my little monkey had fun and he's so happy he's 4! His first request as we put him to bed was, "Now that I'm 4, I can have gum! I'm heavy now, so I can have gum, right?" I want to gobble his soft, sweet little cheeks all up.