Emily's Tea Party

My daughter Emily turned 12 last week and she's having a tea party and sleepover today.




Getting ready for the pre-teen invasion that is currently happening required a little bit of preparation.

First I baked a red velvet cake in a 9"x13" pan to make Bakerella's Red Velvet Cake Balls.  While that was in the oven I made two batches of Rice Krispie candy and pressed it into 10 - 4" mini cake pans.  Those went in the fridge (along with an 8"x8" pan of candy for my husband and I).

While the cake was cooling I rolled out the leftover white marshmallow fondant from last week's cake.  I wanted to make this a quick and easy operation so I just popped the rice crispy treats out of the mini cake pans, put a light skim coat of decorator frosting on the top and flipped them over onto the fondant, where I cut around the cake so there is only a circle of fondant on the top of the rice crispy treats.




I rolled out the blue and purple fondant and my daughters used a flower cookie cutter to cut out shapes.  The rolled some of the white fondant into balls as well.  I showed my oldest how to affix the fondant to itself and let her get to decorating while I cleaned up.

At this point the cake was cool so I transfered it to a large mixing bowl and mixed in the cream cheese frosting.  Emily's tea party has a loose Alice in Wonderland theme so I decided to use some silicone molds I had to make heart shaped cake balls.  I popped these in the freezer to firm up.  After about an hour and a half I set up a glass bowl on top of a pot of water to melt the almond bark.  I suspect that candy melts would work better, but sadly because my daughter is nut-allergic, any colored ones are out of the question and I didn't have time to buy safe white candy melts and coloring.  As soon as the almond bark was ready I popped the cake balls out of the mold and into the white chocolate.  I transferred them to waxed paper to set up and sprinkled them with red sugar.  They are as tasty as they look!



Of course I sampled one...er, maybe two.....ok, ok it was three!

This morning was spent with putting together finger sandwiches.  I picked up one loaf each of white and wheat thin cut bread (Pepperidge Farm I believe) and then worked out what we would have as fillings.

My daughter and I decided on four:  Cucumber with dill mayonnaise, prosciutto with mozzarella and basil, bacon and onion cream cheese, and tomato with provolone and basil.  Some I cut into triangles and others into squares.  I was fortunate enough to harvest the dill, basil, and cucumber out of the garden.   All in all I made 96 tiny little finger sandwiches.  They look cute and are tasty too!




Now it's time to put my feet up, have a drink, and keep one ear on what is going on in the other room.