Chase's Birthday Party

This sweet baby boy turned ONE YEAR OLD last week! So, of course, we had a party!

I had mentioned to my friend Crystal that I wanted her to teach me to decorate cakes, because she's pretty amazing at it. She immediately jumped into party planning mode and using some of her leftover supplies from her baby's birthday party last summer, we put together a beach birthday party for Chase. I made these french vanilla cupcakes, frosted with blue frosting for water, crushed up cookies for sand, and these darling umbrellas for beach themed cupcakes.

The Cake

This cake seriously took me all day, but I loved the way it turned out so it was worth it. It's a four layer butter fudge cake with cookies and cream filling and chocolate cream cheese frosting under the fondant. Crystal gave me a recipe for frosting made without powdered sugar (which is hard to come by here) and it was amazing, my new favorite frosting recipe, even though it was a little time intensive. Crystal came over the night before and we spent three and a half hours putting it all together. It really didn't seem like that long at the time because we were having so much fun, but before I knew it it was 10:30 and we had a finished cake!

The Party set-up

And the sweet birthday boy with his cake

That little birthday hat stayed on about 30 seconds,

but it was really cute while it lasted.

We had three families in our branch come over, all of which conveniently have all little boys.

We had 9 little boys running around our place and Chase LOVED it! He was actually pretty grumpy the morning of his party, but once the kids showed up he was all smiles. We had a yummy lunch of chicken salad sandwiches, pineapple and chips, and then it was time to sing to the birthday boy!

This is Chase's thing now, he points at what he wants.

"I want THAT Dad!"

And then we let the little guy dig in. . .

Chase semi-remembered how to open presents from Christmas a few weeks earlier and has had a blast playing with his new little toys ever since then. These little sunglasses are especially cute on the little guy!

The whole party turned out perfect and it was fun to put something together to celebrate this amazing little boy. A gigantic thanks goes out to Crystal, for not only helping me with the whole party, but also took all of the pictures. Thank you so so much!