Googly Eye Monster Cupcake Wrappers with Oly*Fun

These Googly Eye Monster Cupcakes are sure to be a hit this fall and your kids will be excited to help.  Just be sure you make these for kiddos old enough NOT to put the googly eyes in their mouth as they could be a choking hazard for kids under 3.

Thanks to Fairfield World for supporting my creativity by supplying me with the Oly-Fun™ Craft Material and compensating me for this post.  Ad-Tech provided me with the glue gun and glue.  All ideas and opinions are 100% my own.

Difficulty: Easy
Time: 1/2 Hour not including backing cupcakes

Here's what you'll need to make your own:

18 Sweet Treats Kids Will Love and the Weekly Block Party Link-Up

Turtle Cupcakes | Golden Snitch Cupcakes | No Churn Cookie Monster Ice Cream | Dumbledore's Pensieve Jello | Shaun Sheep Movie Marshmallows | Princess Popcorn Balls | Minion Sugar Cookies | Easy Homemade Dark Chocolate Pudding |  Different Frosting Types | Lemon Sunshine Baking Cup Cookies| Lightning McQueen Birthday Cake | Rocky Road Ice Cream | Sweet 16 Hawaiian Party | Barnyard Party Cupcakes | Gone Fishing Cupcakes | Captain America Shield Cookies | Watermelon Rice Krispie Treats | Minions Pretzel Candy

It's time for another Block Party hosted by Making the World Cuter | Rae Gun Ramblings | Keeping It Simple Crafts | Pieces By Polly!

  Polly, here from Pieces by Polly as your host for this week.  There were so many fun kids treats...you know the kind with lots of sprinkles, food coloring, and candies to make them so fun, I knew we needed a sweet treats round-up.
The last couple weeks, I've been celebrating Happy Harry Potter with Marissa and have been super busy with some new Harry Potter themed projects and several guest posts.   Harry Potter Always and Doe Patronus Pillow | Harry Potter Deathly Hallows Pillow | Harry Potter Wand Skirt | Christmas-in-July Tie Tutorial |  And I'm also in the middle of hosting a Harry Potter Quilt Along to celebrate the release of my Harry Potter Single Hogwarts House Quilt and Harry Potter Hogwarts Crest Quilt patterns.  It's not too late to join!

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Rainbow Dot-to-Dot Birthday Party Ideas

If you want to throw a Rainbow Dot-to-Dot Balloon Party, you've come to the right place.  I've got lots of easy ideas to share with you today.  (Disclaimer, I was given the Poly-Fil and Fabric Markers mentioned in this post, but this post is not compensated and all ideas and opinions are mine.)

I'm secretly kind of happy when my kids choose some unique and/or obscure birthday party theme.  Especially when it's centered around something they really love.

We only do "real" birthday parties at our house on certain birthday, because it can be a lot of work.  On the off years the kids still get to have a friend over for a play date, they get to choose the dinner, and after dinner the family has cake...so we still celebrate every year.  They just only get a full blown party with theme and favors and everything once in a while.

Kindergarten is one of the birthday years.  Becca had a hard time narrowing down a themes, and wanted a Rainbow-Dot-to-Dot-Balloon birthday party, which actually left me a lot of leeway.  (It reminded me a bit of the Fancy-Costume-Swim Party that Elephant and Piggie get invited to in I am Invited to a Party by Mo Willems...affiliate link)

Dot-to-Dot Birthday Cake

On the outside, we made a plain white cake.  Then I piped her name out with colored frosting.  Then I added mini M&M's (upside-down) and write numbers on them using a food-safe marker with edible ink (affiliate link).

Christmas Cut-Out Cupcakes

If you're a long-time reader, you might remember the Christmas Cut-Out Cupcakes I did for Mandy at Sugar Bee Crafts last year.  Here's a new spin on The Christmas Cut-Out Cupcakes using some of my favorite Nestle candies.  Disclaimer:  I was provided with candy by Nestle and compensated for designing this project and writing this post.  All opinions expressed are my own.

I've actually made quite a few versions of Cut-Out cupcakes for different holidays.  Cut-Out cupcakes are one of my favorites for taking to kids' parties because the frosting is hidden just under the surface.  That makes them easier to transport and keeps the frosting of the kids faces.  Not to mention, it also discourages the kids from licking the frosting off and leaving the cupcake.

Using Wonka Nerds for the sprinkles make the decorating easy, as they're much easier to control the placement than traditional sprinkles.  We also loved the Wonka Gobstoppers for some fun.

Seth came up with our favorite...and easiest design...all on his own.

Head over to Nestle's Simply Celebrate blog for the simple secret to getting the cupcakes mounded enough to make these work.

And be sure to enter Nestle's Pinterest Sweepstakes for a chance to win $100 Visa Gift Card.

Christmas Tree Cupcakes

We here at Pieces by Polly love a good cupcake project.  Kids will love the mound of frosting and the chocolate goodie hidden beneath it these Christmas Tree Cupcakes.  Disclaimer:  I was provided by Nestle with candy and compensated for designing and blogging about this project.  All opinions are my own.

 I've blogged before about how much I love 7-Minute Frosting for decorating with kids. 

Wonka Nerds are my new favorite sprinkle.  They're small enough to look like sprinkles and large enough to really be noticeable.  Plus we all love that fruity crunch they add.

These are fun enough for any kids' Christmas party and classic enough for grown-up too.

Head over to Nestle's Simply Celebrate Blog for all the instructions.  You'll have a whole forest ready in no-time.

And be sure to enter Nestle's Pinterest Sweepstakes for a chance to win $100 Visa Gift Card.

Easy Rudolf the Red-Nosed Reindeer Cupcakes

I'm excited to show you another project I put together for Nestle...Rudolf the Red-Nosed Reindeer Cupcakes.  (Disclaimer: I was provided with candy by Nestle and was compensated to write this post and a post for their blog.)  It's been a lot of fun to play with their candies, and get familiar with their products.  Their Gobstopper Snowballs are one of my new favorite decorating candies.  They're perfectly round and really make these pop.

Nestle wanted projects that were simple and that kids can do.  This definitely fits the bill as even Becca was able to decorate some without much help, and Seth was a pro.  So if you've got to take treats to a holiday party, these are easy and will be a hit!

Head on over to Nestle's Simply Celebrate blog for the step-to-step how-to.

And be sure to enter Nestle's Pinterest Sweepstakes for a chance to win $100 Visa Gift Card.

"Organic" Chemistry Cupcakes for Mole Day or Any Day

Happy Mole Day everyone!  In honor of the greatest chemistry holiday few people know about, I thought I'd share a sweet treat, even your less geeky friends will appreciate.  Organic Cupcakes!

Or rather Organic Chemistry Cupcakes.

While the hubby and I are all for natural food...having chemistry backgrounds we do occasionally poke fun at people calling particular food "organic" because from a chemistry perspective pretty much all food except for salt is organic.  (The field of organic chemistry deals with pretty much any chemistry relating to carbon compounds...which is just about everything relating to living things and what we eat.)

Eric likes to do something with his science classes to celebrate Mole Day.  A mole is a number...kinda like a dozen means 12...although instead of being something countable, a mole is 602200000000000000000000.  It's important in chemistry, and since the shorter way to write it is 6.022x 10^23, chemistry geeks take the 10^23 part and turn that into October 23rd.  If you'd like to learn more about moles, well you can learn a lot from this song.

All-Boy Art Birthday Party

  Note: If you're looking for the You Keep Me in Stitches Giveaway click here.

I can't believe my boy turned 6 this week!

Seth is in LOVE with art lately.  He and Becca go in his room and "do art" for hours at a little table we have in there.  I can't remember who suggested it, but when an art party came up as a theme for his party, he jumped at it. 

And I was super happy to have a theme with so many creative possibilities and that it was something we want to encourage him in.   We've told our kids they just get parties on certain birthdays (6, 8, 12, etc).  They get a cake and little family celebration (as in dessert right after dinner) every year, but not a lot.  So it's fun to put some extra effort into the parties we do have.

Overall the kids loved it.  And despite the title of the post, we did have girls at the party and they enjoyed the projects too, we just especially found projects that would appeal to boys.  It took a little planning ahead to make sure we had the art supplies on hand, but other than buying the supplies we really did pretty much everything for the party the day before.  (And remember I have my husband home during the summers, so I had him to help out getting ready and helping during the party.)

I'm really not a fan of party favors...at least not the kind where you buy cheap toys so the guests go home with something.  I am a big fan of party favors that serve as entertainment and/or props to the party itself, so the kids got to take home some fun art projects.  I wanted to do some kinds of art projects that used materials and techniques they might not learn at school (where they pretty much stick to paper, crayons, and occasionally tempera paint).

Here's what we did:

Easy Monster Cake

Anson turned 1!  (Well, he turned 1 a month and a half ago, but I'm just getting around to sharing his cake now.)

We try to keep birthday for infants and toddlers pretty simple around here.

Classy Yellow Valentines Cupcakes

I thought I'd take a little break from all the Harry Potter posts for those of you who aren't Harry Potter fans.

I have nothing against red and pink, but sometimes all the pink-and-red-goodness around Valentine's Day is a bit too much, so I thought I'd try something a little different.  (Okay, and maybe I also had extra yellow frosting left over from these.)  Of course you could whip one of these up in a more traditional color too and they'd be lovely.  I used Wilton food coloring gel...mostly yellow with a little orange added in to make it more golden.

I had some extra white chocolate left over from making the wings for our Golden Snitch Cupcakes, so I used it to make a few little hearts.  (Just melt it in your microwave on the defrost setting for about 30 seconds at a time, stirring in between until it's all melted.  Then pipe out of the snipped off corner of a ziploc bag onto wax paper or a cookie sheet and allow to cool.

Harry Potter Birthday Party - Tips, Treats and Favors

I'll be having quite a few Harry Potter themed posts coming up with tutorials and resources to throw an awesome Harry Potter party that's inexpensive and your kids will love.  I thought I'd do an overview of the whole party in case I get distracted by some other crafting interest to get you excited about whats coming.  The battery on my camera died shortly after the party started, so there aren't many in-progress pictures...but with 15 kids to keep busy, there probably wouldn't have been many anyway.

Here's what we did...

Golden Snitch Cupcakes for Quidditch or Harry Potter Fan

Hopefully a few of my readers are Harry Potter fans because now that Katie's Harry Potter Birthday Party is over, there are going to be quite a few Harry Potter themed posts.  I really should start with a recap of the whole party (You can now see a recap of the whole Harry Potter party here.) ...but I don't feel up to sorting through all the pictures...so I'm starting with something easy...the Golden Snitch Cupcakes.  They look impressive, but were surprisingly easy to make.

If you do a search on Pinterest for Harry Potter Cupcakes you'll come up with some amazing ideas that take at least 10 different colors of fondant that were way out of my league for trying to replicate.  If you search for Harry Potter Cakes, you'll come up with hundreds of absolutely astounding cakes that I'm sure took a professional baker days to make (you really should check them out...they're amazing)...so I looked through the ideas until I found some I thought I could manage and settled on some golden snitches.  It's a nice bonus that Katie's favorite thing about the first Harry Potter movie is the quidditch match scene.

Katie also got Quidditch through the Ages as one of several books she got for her birthday, so it went along nicely.

You start by...

Cookie Decorating Party! - Tips for Cookie Decorating with Kids

Okay, so I wasn't sure whether or not I was crazy to let my kids invite a bunch of friends over for a cookie decorating party.  I was pretty sure I was crazy...but we did it anyway and it turned out awesome.  Even though the cookies are a lot of work, sometimes I feel like it's easier to have a bunch of friends over at one time rather than arranging a ton of different play dates...and I think it's fun for the kids to have a party for something other than a birthday when one child is the center of attention.

Now I am lucky that we live almost next door to the kids' school, so they could all just walk over after school instead of figuring out rides for everyone or driving some poor bus driver crazy.  It's also nice (and crazy) to have all the guests arrive at one time, rather than trickle in as parents drop them off.

By the time I remembered to pull my camera out, a couple of the kids had left the table to go play.  In total, in the morning Becca and 3 other preschoolers decorated cookies in the morning.  Then after school, Katie and Seth had 14 kindergarteners and second graders over.  (I know...crazy...but there were even a few who couldn't come.  We just didn't want anyone to feel excluded.)

It was fun to see the kids having so much fun creating with all kinds of sugar.  They each seemed to have their own preferred method of sugar high.

Like the frosting mountains...

Christmas Cut-Out Cupcakes

If you've read my blog for a while, you knew this was coming...  Christmas Cut-Out Cupcakes...

Perfect for a fun and simple treat for your kids' Christmas parties coming up at school.

I'm guest posting at Sugar Bee Crafts for the full details...I have to say I felt pretty clever for figuring out the easy way to make those candy cane stripes.

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