Ain’t no party like a Star Wars party (Episode I)

(Wow – it HAS been a long time between blogs – apologies. Full time work (plus a study course for a few months) AND an awesome hubby who cooks most of my meals, doesn’t leave much time to blog and space for inspiration! But stay tuned, ".....there is another")

 I’m always a fan of a themed party; whether its Yule (see here and here), Christmas, or age appropriate birthday themes. Thus, I always have sleepless nights get excited when I have a kids birthday party coming up. Son 2’s birthday was in October, so I started dropping hints early September about what type of theme he would like (It's always a delicate dance between what HE wants and what I think I can work with). His first suggestion was Jurassic World, which had me envisioning lots of fossil and dinosaur related treats (which I had seen around the Interweb). Not a bad start, BUT with the new Star Wars movie (Episode VII:The Force Awakens) coming out a few months later (and us being a house of huge Star Wars fans), I easily steered him in that direction.

 We have always been fans of Star Wars. Husband and I have had several occasions where we watched the original trilogy back to back (one time with special blue colored milk). We went and saw all of the remastered movies when they came out, as well as all of the prequels on opening night. We have shelves of books, boxes of toys, cups and plates,  and even had a large film poster dominating our lounge room for many years. With the newer cartoons of the last few years, I had done a previous Star Wars:The Clone Wars party for Son 1.  We had that party in a park, which did impact on my creativity as I had to be able to transport everything there and back. I was able to have a few Star Wars touches (like lightsaber breadsticks, and we made Stormtrooper masks), but not the whole shebang like I would have with a party at home.

 Now was my chance.

 As with most themed parties I throw, it becomes more about what I DON'T end up making than what I do. With Pintrest and many many Star Wars fans on the internet, there are A LOT of party ideas around! After my Minecraft party (....which I didn't actually blog about), Son 2 liked the idea of cool food labels, so it was also what I could get a good pun name for. 

I did see some great labels online, but some of them made NO sense....

 Han Burgers?? **

  

 No – much more sensible to do Han SOLO! And his friend, Luke Sky-Water!

Printed labels to the rescue

 (In their defense, Americans don’t have Solo as a drink. Hooray for us)

 I did my breadstick lightsabers again - small pieces of aluminium foil wrapped around grissini-style breadsticks. (I even still had the on-off switch colored stickers I had used from Son 1’s party; I kept them “just in case”. Because that's what I do).

   We also had A.T-C.H.I.P.S and Death Star Bites – not very pun-worthy but it was then best I could come up with for potato chips and cheezels (two party staples)!

 Another party staple is fairy bread, which has made it into several parties by way of cookie cutters to cut the bread. Luckily for me, my brother (who lives in Canada) had sent me some Star Wars sandwich cutters (as well as some pancake moulds – if only I could have incorporated them!).

 So that made it easy to have Galaxy bread (as in “… a galaxy far, far away).

TIE fighters on the left, Millennium Falcons on the right 

 For hot food, we had mini Hutt Dogs (straight from Pintrest) and X-wing bites. 

 The X-Wing bites came from trying to think of something to do with chicken nuggets (One of Son 2's favorite foods)! I ended up using chicken fingers (rather than nuggets), and joining them in an X-shape with toothpicks: very low tech but very well received.

 I also made a batch of Wookie cookies (thanks to Ro for the idea). I used a slightly different recipe (its quite tricky to find "tofffee bits"); the Neiman-Marcus oatmeal cookie recipe (I didn't blend the oats to give them more of a textured look). I also attempted to make elongated cookies (more Chewbacca-esque shape) than Ro's round ones; but as you can see, they did that anyway as I didn't space them our enough on the tray (seriously, I was not going to dirty another tray for ONE cookie!). The most misshapen ones were the "quality control" cookies.

Looking more like Adipose from Doctor Who rather than a warrior from Kashyyyk. But still yum.

I also did a a variation on the s’mores that I had been making.

 I had seen a few variations on TIE fighter snacks on Pintrest – usually with cheese biscuits and a piece of cheese in between

Thankyou random Star Wars fan

But by this stage of planning I needed a few more sweet things, so decided to make my own s’mores TIE cookies!   A batch of chocolate cookies cut in a hexagon (very hard to find a hexagonal cookie cutter!), with a marshmallow in-between, held in place by melted chocolate. Yum!

Again with the too-closely spaced cookies! You'd think I'd have learnt....

TIE assembly line: cookies, chocolate, marshmallow, chocolate, cookie

 If I was making them again, I would make the biscuits a bit smaller, like this...

Thankyou other random Star Wars Fan

 (wait, is that peanut butter they've used to stick them together?? Yum!!!)
 I was trying to do them to scale (yes, I did get out a TIE fighter toy and measure it. Beacause that's what I do), but they ended up being about 7cm long which made them quite ungainly to stick together and store. Delicious, just awkward, and the cookie-to-marhsmallow ratio was all wrong.)

  And to offset all that sugar, I also made FruiTIE fighters as well – (smaller) hexagons of melon with a grape or strawberry in between.

 AND in the just-because-its-cool category, I had marshmallow Storm trooper helmets. This one mainly came about because I had been suckered into buying a bag of Jumbo marshmallows from Costco. Which look great, but are quite difficult to toast over a fire, so I still had ¾ of a bag-full! This was fun as I could use the helmet design for the newest trooper from “The Force Awakens” as well as Clone Troopers. The trick with this was tracking down a black food pen, as well as drawing precisely on a spongy surface!

Not terribly drawn, just not super well drawn.

In easy Grab-and-Eat appropriately themed cups.

 And you can’t just eat at a party, you need activities (especially with boys!!). Husband has amassed quite a collection of Star Wars figures over the years, so they got pulled out. And being 7 year old boys, I knew that if I could incorporate shooting things, it would be a bigger hit. So I set up a Star Wars shooting gallery – Nerf guns aimed at different size figurines. We found that Jabba the Hutt was quite difficult to knock over due to his wide base. As was the super sized Qui Gon Jinn.

 Sticking with the idea of Use What You Have , I also organized Trooper Bowling (another Pintrest idea) – I printed out a few Stormtrooper masks and stuck them to the pins on our bowling set. The we could roll our “Death Star” bowling ball to it and see how many troopers got knocked over (and for the Fans out there – yes, I know the Stormtroopers were on the same side as the Death Star, but it worked better that way!).

Definitely too short to be Stormtroopers

 And finally some combat practice. A popular Star Wars party idea was to make your own lightsabers; some parties even made this as an activity. I knew from previous years that the kids didn’t want to MAKE things so much as PLAY with them, so I pre-made these. Super complicated: Step one – purchase pool noodle from shop (in appropriate colours – I had blue and green as I didn’t want any red Dark Side sabers). Step 2 – cut pool noodle in half to make a suitable blade for 7-year-olds. Step 3 – sticky tape “Lightsaber hilts” (printed out from the internet) around the base and voila!

Looks effective, super easy. My favorite

 But make sure to set some rules before you unleash them on each other, or it would be chaos (ours were No Hitting on the Head and only Two people fighting each other at a time).

Working up an appetite AND burning off sugar

 Last but not least, we had the cake. If I had the time I would have made something awesome like this  or even this!!! (I would have loved making the X-wing and TIE Fighters. The oodles and oodles of Death Star building bits not so much). But as I had the kids party as well as a family party in three days I decided to be sensible and go the cake topper route.

Family Party cake

Kids party Cake. Two toppers = better value postage

 Perfect.

 The kids had a ball, the food was a hit and all went home happy.

 The Force was indeed with us.


** I did eventually get this - it was a pun worthy twist on HAMburgers.....

B is for Birthday (and bubbles!)

 It was my birthday at the weekend - Happy Birthday To Me!

 For as long as I can remember I have liked Birthdays - the presents, the lovely messages, the catching up with friends and family, the legitimate excuse to have lots of yummy (and often bad for you) food and drink PLUS being The Centre of Attention; what's not to like?!?!? As part of my annual Birthday Celebrations, I generally have a Family catch-up (traditionally a backyard BBQ) and a Friends catch up at whatever new or cool restaurant I've unearthed that I want to try out. Last year my birthday fell on a Wednesday which was most annoying and very tricky to organise - do you celebrate the weekend before or after?? And I work on Wednesdays and thus I was unable to cook up any type of storm, so Friends and Family all decamped to my local pub for a rowdy and raucous dinner in the bistro. Lots of fun (and no cooking or cleaning up for me) but no new Cooking Endeavors.

 So this year I was looking forward to trying out at least one or two recipes from my never-ending collection of Yummy Thing to Cook. I invited some friends over for dinner on the night of my birthday; we could have gone out somewhere but my Restaurant of the Moment is The Black Toro which makes divine Mexican food but is not always a cheap option. So I decided to have a dinner party at home. Which to most people is the antithesis of Birthday Celebrations: "Why are you doing the cooking on your birthday?" Because I Like To. Because I enjoy it. Because I love trying new recipes and sharing them with friends. Because its My Birthday and I can do whatever I want!! And Cook whatever I want (taking into account guests likes and dislikes, of course). So this led to several lovely hours flipping through cookbooks, and mixing and matching various meal ideas; something relaxed and fun like tacos? Or themed like a Moroccan feast? Or go all out and try some molecular gastronomy?? I did decide that cooking fresh doughnuts for dessert was probably not a good choice as deep frying after a few glasses of wine would not amuse the Health and Safety guys (i.e Husband).

 So after much deliberating I settled on  pork belly for mains as roast pork was always one of my favorite dishes growing up, and I hadn't been brave enough to tackle pork belly yet. I had a recipe from the Vineyard Cookbook ("Max's Tuscan Stuffed Pork" from Max's at Red Hill Estate - one of my favorite wineries) that I had earmarked the first time I looked through the book, but had never had the appropriate occasion. I also hadn't had a good look around for where to  buy pork belly, but that gave me a good research project. The recipe suggested serving it with mashed potato (meaning it was probably better suited to a mid-winter feast rather than a late summer birthday. Oh well!) so I decided to make 'Paris Mash' by Guillaume Brahimi; as The Frenchman and his wife were dinner guests it seemed appropriate! And then to add a bit of color (and something cholesterol free!) with some green beans. I was tossing up between a few versions of some sort of chocolate flan/tart thing for dessert, until I came across a Baci Gelato recipe in the Delicious Summer Special. Having already had one Epic Fail at Baci ice cream (read this to be reminded) you may wonder why I chose to revisit such a Disaster. Well, this recipe looked a lot more like  other ice cream recipes I had been making (and Delicious magazine haven't really steered me wrong yet), and I was not going to a let a recipe (let alone a chocolate related dessert one) beat me! Plus it would hopefully appease my not-a-fan-of-dessert-Husband.

 Birthday Day arrived and after a lovely day at work with text messages and cookies and cupcakes, I headed home early, because well, hey! It's my birthday! I picked some herbs from my garden (because I can and I love it) and  proceeded to Prepare The Pork. Knowing full well that The Crackling will either make or break a pork roast, I followed the anecdotal advice to dry it out as much as possible before cooking. I also knew that Salt was an Important part, which was not a problem in this recipe as roughly 1/3 cup salt was used for 1.2kg of pork! So lots of lovely pink Murray River Salt Flakes were rubbed all over the skin, plus inside with the herb and fennel mix before the whole thing was rolled and tied. Into a  lovely hot over it went for an hour, then lowered the temperature for the next hour or so. It smelled divine while cooking which is always a good sign, but I was more interested in how it crunched! I churned the ice cream while the pork was cooking, and it was going so far so good with Baci Mark II - it was already way ahead of the other recipe in that the custard had actually thickened on the stove! I also prepared The Mash, which had an interesting twist in that you cooked the potatoes whole with the skin on and THEN peeled them. I'm not sure how this contributed to the end product but I won't argue with a Frenchman. After peeling them and passing through a potato ricer, the mash is then put back in the saucepan for a few minutes to remove excess moisture. THEN you mixed in hot milk and a LOT of butter - the recipe had 600g of potato to 250g of butter! I think its safe to say that it won't get the Heart Foundation tick anytime soon, and no wonder is supposedly tasted divine! I cooked just under 500g of potato for the 4 of us and had out about 120g of butter, but it was getting to quite a liquid consistency before I added it all so I stopped (and I think I heard my arteries cheer as I did).

 Guests arrived, champagne was popped, presents were given (Hooray!) and then it was The Moment of Truth - Crackling Time. And it did (double hooray!). It was so crispy and crunchy, but the meat inside was still tender and just about falling apart as I carved - yummmmmm. In fact it was so yum that there was hardly any leftovers! I will definitely make more nexy time as cold roast pork sandwiches are delcious.

Bon Appetit!

 The ice cream set beautifully and was also delcious, with the white chocolate-hazelnut slab on the side. So obviously the culinary angels were smiling at me on my birthday. Success!

 Now onto the Family Gathering. Mindful of keeping things easy and relaxed, summer family get-togethers are generally BBQ related - everyone can bring a salad or dessert and it all works well. In previous years I have served various kebabs/shaslicks combinations, slow roasted and marinated meats and even Beer Butt Chicken (Google it if you are unfamiliar with this quirky cooking style). This year I expanded on an regular family dinner idea - mini hot dogs. Grab some small chipolata sausages and a packet of Bake-at-Home dinner rolls and it makes a nice change from sausages-in-bread. To make it a bit more Grown Up for my party, I cooked onions and had out shredded cheeses, tomato and barbeque sauce as well as American Mustard, so you could have your 'Dog with whatever 'fixins' you liked. Easy to prepare, easy to serve and yum and fun to eat.

"Whad'll it be??"

   And then there was The Cake. For what is a birthday without a Birthday Cake?!?!



 I found this recipe in the January Delicious: "Indulgent Chocolate Cake with Dulce de Leche".

 You had me at Indulgent. You had me even more at Indulgent Chocolate Cake!

 And they weren't kidding - four layers of cake with chocolate filling and caramel in between . Probably a bit too much for my usual dinner part desserts (it served 8-10 and I don't think it could have been easily adapted for a half or quarter version!), but it sounded perfect for a Birthday Cake.

 Well, not only was it Indulgent, it was also Involved. For the cake batter, you had to cream the butter and sugar, then gradually add flour and alternate it with buttermilk, THEN add whipped egg whites! 

  The Filling was whipped butter and sugar mixed with melted chocolate, and to assemble, it was a layer of cake, then chocolate filling, then dulce de leche (which I couldn't source so I used Caramel Top n' Fill - sneaky!), repeated 3 times, then topped with melted chocolate. Obviously a Weight Watchers - Diabetic Australia Approved recipe!

 It was the first time I'd made a multi-level cake and a I managed to avoid some of the rookie mistakes such as cutting uneven layers. The only issues I has was the Stability of the Cake! It was warm day and the filling was very soft which meant there was a bit of sliding when putting on the top layers! Eeek!

"Steady...steady!!"

 I managed to keep it all together and even piped on some flowers to make it look all pur-dee.

('T' being my girlfriend who had her birthday on the day of my party)

 

  And good lord it was Delicious. Thankfully not too intensely chocolate as some cakes can be, just very sweet and yummy. Everyone was very happy with a small slice (which was no mean feat trying to keep all four layers together during the slicing!) which did mean I had about a quarter left over. Thankfully its all gone now; I managed to "share the calories" with my work mates and also deliver a piece to my cousin who had missed the party. I think my blood sugar is just starting to go back to normal....

 However, I have already had a request to make this magnificent cake again for one of my Ladies Lunches I have regularly with some girlfriends. I felt a little like the guy in MacArthur Park (no, my cake didn't get left out in the Rain)  "cause it took so long to bake it! Oh noooooo!!!" But its not the difficulty of the cake, more that there would be only three of us to share The Cake, which not be good for any of our waistlines. Maybe I can save it for one of their birthdays....

 In the meantime, I have 360 odd days to work out what I can cook for my birthday Next Year! Might just go flick through a recipe book now......