Hello Everyone!
This Saturday we celebrated our daughters’ birthdays. The theme this year if you can’t guess from the blog title was…a …. FIESTA! Olé!
Every year we throw a themed party, of our kids’ choosing, and we try very hard to make sure it is not just a theme thrown together, but one that is a special escape for our guests. Like a few parties of our past that I blogged about before … the Circus, Paris, Japan and Harry Potter.
We are huge admirers of the Mexican culture, all of us but namely me, so I am sort of surprised this theme hadn’t come up before. My thought process to execute this party was to keep with the authenticity of the culture. The heartfelt music, the vibrant colors, the flowers, the rustic street food, the folk art, and the overall natural beauty that we love in Mexico. It all sounds amazing, and that is because Mexico is amazing!
Let me get started with the details.
We sat down one night to talk about what we could put together to convey the fun of a fiesta in an invitation…and we came up with this!
The Food was my favorite part of this whole gathering. I LOVE MEXICAN FOOD. We ordered catering from Three Amigos in a town nearby. Our good friends had introduced us to this place through their parties, and it was just a no brainer for this themed one. and A big thank you to my sister-in-law who went to pick up this for us on her way over! YOU ROCK!
Our menu selection was simple Mexican street food; it was loved by everyone. We ordered chips, salsa, guacamole, chicken tacos, beef fajitas, rice, beans and all the accompanying items like lettuce, tomatoes, more salsa and guacamole, sour cream and cheese. There was a lot of food!!
Then I worked on what to do for the Cake. At first, I had talked about getting the cake from our bakery, but for some reason my husband and I talked ourselves out of that and made it ourselves. We loosely designed a cake, then went from there.
Friday before the party I woke up early to bake the cakes (and cupcakes, and brownies, and cookies!). The cake and cupcakes were a rich chocolate cake. The brownies were fudge chocolate with a hint of cinnamon, Mexican Chocolate (which is my favorite!) and I made Mexican chocolate chip cookies. *drool* As everything was cooling my mother showed up, and we made different color marshmallow fondant for the cake. We had a lot of fun making a mess in the kitchen, lots of powdered sugar everywhere! Then I layered the cake with chocolate frosting, then crumb coated it with a vanilla frosting. It was a pretty tall cake!
Saturday morning my husband, who is the artist, took the cake and layered all the fondant as I stuck on the FIESTA bunting I had made a week prior.
I think it came out pretty great! Especially for a cake made with so much love from my family. 🙂
The cake was set up with all the treats that I made but also zeppole that my mom made, donuts, butter cookies sent over from my good friend’s mother (huge surprise!), oreos and candies. The cake table looked like a kids fantasy!
Another one of my favorite crafty things to put together is the photo backdrop for every party. I think it is a lot of fun and adds another element to the party. For this I grabbed a serape, an extra-large hay bale, a cactus cut out and some plastic clothes with a printed image of the national eagle to create the Mexican flag. We ended up having a few sombrero from past parties we have attended, and boom…cute backdrop! Oh, and mustaches!!
The decorations was an aspect of the party that I wanted to get right. The one thing that you will see everywhere there is a Mexican fiesta is the colors. Everything is colorfully bright and cheerful. I made tissue paper flowers, about twenty of them, to decorate the entrance of the yard along with colorful draping cloths.
Then I hung extra-large papel picado above the patio from the second floor windows. Which are pretty high, but I didn’t take a shot of them but you can see some of the papers hovering above the heads of our guests.
The tables were set in colorful cloths and as the centerpiece I had fashioned mini serapes with a pair of maracas, a colorful glass vase filled with an array of colored tissue flowers and a Virgin of Guadalupe candle. It all came together real well.
Then along the back fence I had hung Mexican folk art every few feet.
The party favor came to me totally by luck. I was walking in a store when I happened to see these pineapple glass jar cups in a set of four. After a quick hunt in the store, my daughter and I gathered together 24 cups! Yes for 24 kids! (ay dios mio..I know) After slipping a piece of colorful tissue inside, and topping the cups with construction paper leaves and handwritten Gracias notes, it was the cutest addition to the day.
Our kids and I decided to dress up for the occasion together. Usually it is just them, but they love when I put my hair up with flowers, and I think it made our guests and their parents happy to see us all dolled up. I got a lot of compliments.
We filled the air with Mariachi music, and the party started! Here are the photos I had taken of the day’s fun:
Valeria Out Loud 
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