Toy Story Birthday Party Treats

Emma is turning 4 in 3 days exactly - we're not even going to go into that right now, but this past weekend we had two small parties for her.  The first was a small kids bowling party and the second was spent at our house with her grandparents and great-grandparents and each of her aunts.  The girls' are lucky as they have 6 sets of grandparents around, so I like to have grandparent only parties.

For each party we came up with different desserts to have.  For the kids' I made some Jessie hats.  Sorry for the off coloring it was 10pm the night before the party when I was doing these.  These were super simple to make and a BIG hit with the kids!

Here's the simple how-to: Baked some break apart sugar cookies.  Flip them over and smooth some red icing on them.  Put a red gumdrop or similar shaped candy in the center.  Pipe the lacing around the outside of the cookie in white.  Ouila - you're finished!  

Close-up of the cookies. 

The cookies bagged up along with the favors each kid got.

For the grandparents party I'd seen the alien cupcakes done a few places and knew that we had to make them.  Plus, I've been dying to color some cake batter and make some rainbow cupcakes.  The Hubs LOVED the way the coloring came out, he even took the leftovers to work today and all of the guys "ooohed & aaahed" over them.  

Here's the How-to on the alien cupcakes: colored white icing green and smoothed on all of the cupcakes.  Then I halved spearmint leaves for the ears.  I matched up two fronts or backs of the leaves for each cupcakes so they had the same shape.  For the spike at the top we found some apple licorice at Target, they were called Australian something.  Piped the 3 white eyes, put mini chocolate chips upside down for the eye centers.  And piped on the mouth with black gel.  

Really you could let your imagination run with other candy ideas, marshmallows or mentos for the eyes.  Taffy or leather strips for the ears.  Black jellybeans for the mouth.  The possibilities are endless. 

*Note: for all of the icing and cake batter coloring I used Wilton's concentrated gel coloring - I got the 8 pack with a 40% coupon, so you couldn't beat the price*.

Picture of the cupcakes before they were decorated, you can see the mixture of colors. 

This is how we had them displayed at the party.  The Hubs & Emma made a claw out of the Hubs old K'nex - I think this turned out fantastic and loved incorporating it into the cupcake stand.

I'm linking to these parties.