Clara's Chocolate Birthday Party

Clara is turning 2 tomorrow and we held a birthday party for her yesterday to celebrate. Sonya and Clara both love chocolate and we showed them this series of Cadbury chocolate advertisements that used to play on TV with the Beach Boys theme song. They have been singing the song ever since! Watch one of the chocolate video by following the link below:

Cadbury - Wouldn't it be Nice!

Anyways, when we had trouble deciding what kind of party we should have for Clara, they both suggested that it should be an everything chocolate party.


I made these Charlie and the Chocolate Factory inspired invitation. I took 4 Hershey's chocolate and rewrapped them in aluminium foil complete with my own wrapper. There was a "Golden Ticket" inside to inform the guests of the details of the party.

Almost everything served at the party had chocolate inside. The favor bags contained a chocolate lollipop too :)

We didn't have too much decorations. Just lots of balloons and some streamers.

We invited a total of 15 kids to the party.

Here is Alana (above) and her sister Leilani (below).

Here is our next door neighbor, Eugene.

Here is Bjarney, who is going to the same kindergarten as Sonya this September.

And, there is Elizabeth playing balloons with Bjarney (above) and looking pretty with Alana and Leilani (below).

Here is baby Brian who will be turning 1 next month :)

This pretty girl is Alexandra who just turned 2 2 weeks ago herself. Her mummy, Carla, is Sonya and Alana's preschool teacher at Haggerty.

Of course, there is our ex-next-door-neighbor, Manuela and her mummy, Macarena. Manuela now does gymnastic with Clara every week. They are both huge fans of "Sizzle Sizzle POP!"

Here are Lea and her brother, Jan.

Here is Rinka. Her little sister Haruka was there too.

Last but not least, there is Michael who just became a big brother to baby Raphael a month ago.

We organized 2 activities for the party. The first was ice-cream making using the Play-and-Freeze Mega Ice Cream Maker that I got free from Craigslist. The ball consists of two compartments. One is for ice and rock salt and the other is for the ingredients (heavy cream, sugar, vanilla) for the ice-cream. The idea is to roll the ball round and round for about 30 minutes and the heavy cream gets churned into ice-cream.

Each of the older kids got a turn to roll the ball around and in return, they got a sugar cookie "medal" to wear and munch.

The next activity was a silly idea that I came up with. Each child gets assigned a cup secured to the side of the table. The objective was to use a straw and blow as many of the cotton balls into their own cups. It wasn't an easy task and eventually, we let them use the straws to push the cotton balls into the cups instead.

The little kids had an easier task. All they had to do was to use their hands to pick up the cottons balls scattered on the floor and place them into the cups.

At the end of the game, they each counted the number of cotton balls they have in their cups and exchanged them for Hershey's Kisses.

While the second activity was going on, the two "big boys" were hard at work rolling the ice-cream ball around.

Unfortunately for us, it didn't get cold enough to get frozen ice-cream. Maybe we didn't have enough ice but the furthest we got was thick milk shake. We scooped all of it into a tub and placed it in the freezer to get proper ice-cream.

The grand finale was of course birthday cake time. I made a two-tier chocolate cake with berries for Clara. At the top of the cake was Clara's chocolate portrait that I "painted".

Clara was totally fascinated with the birthday candles.

After we got home, although it was really time for Clara to take a nap, Sonya and Clara just would not rest till I let them opened the presents.

Did Clara have a happy birthday? In her own words, "It was fun happy birthday!" A big thanks to all the guests for coming and the presents :)