Elizabeth KellyOctober 26, 2023Comment

Panda Party

Elizabeth KellyOctober 26, 2023Comment

Custom Watercolour topper featuring Aiden’s name, the number 8 and a panda.

To celebrate my son Aiden’s 8th Birthday we again focused in on one of his favourite animals as a point of inspiration - the panda!

We created a lush bamboo forest setting for this party by bringing in some pots of real bamboo to set up around the table. The green of the garden setting also added to the atmosphere.

The lush bamboo setting of the dessert table

The background of green and bamboo leaves was the perfect background for a gathering of pandas in different forms. I painted a number of large watercolour pandas to decorate around the party and panda helium balloons bobbed around the garden. Edible pandas included the main cake, cookies and cupcakes. Panda Cake Pops by Sugarpop Bakery were a cute addition to the party which meant all the guests could grab a panda to nibble on.

Using a teddy bear shaped cake tin that my Mum had bought and used for one of my parties growing up I created this panda cake by decorating it in two tones of fluffy buttercream, one plain, the other a dark chocolate.

Aiden blows out the candle on his Panda Cake

One of the things I enjoyed baking for Aidan’s party were these gingerbread cookies. I had a lot of fun painting panda faces using the edible paints to draw the eyes and noses onto the cookies. They turned out really cute and with a light lemon icing they were delicious as well!

I also made chocolate Nutella cupcakes decorated with green sprinkles in green striped cupcake cases to represent bamboo. On top I added my custom designed hand-painted watercolour panda cupcake toppers. The cupcake toppers have been working really well at my parties, guests really love them and most cupcake toppers end up heading home as souvenirs of the event at the end of the day.

Other dessert treats adorning the dessert table included little blueberry tarts, jellies and cocoa wafers reminiscent of pandas and bamboo sticks. Traditional Malaysian Kueh cakes made of pandan and coconut were a great reflection of the Panda theme.

I also set up a secondary table for savoury snacks and plates and drinks. I kept to the theme of the day for this one as well. Rice balls with seaweed cut ears and noses, Chinese style spring rolls and dips with bits of ‘bamboo’ - celery sticks, cucumber sticks and green beans meant guests could pretend they were pandas enjoying the feast. Veggie straws and edible green beans also added to the idea.

When I plan parties I love taking a theme and exploring it across all the different aspects of an event. Choosing a menu has always been part of that fun and it’s also nice to think of little ‘twists’ to a food idea that can make it fit the theme better. I chose to serve noodle boxes as a more substantial lunch option for hungry pandas, we’ve had noodles before at party boxes which were popular and noodles fit the Chinese background of a Panda’s habitat but the ‘twist’ this year was to make them green tea noodles as a nod to the panda’s diet.

For games we played “Feed the Panda” where you had to pin a piece of bamboo to the Panda’s mouth. There were also sticks of bamboo, plenty of balls and bubbles that the kids ran around the garden with as they conjured up the spirit of playful pandas tumbling through a bamboo grove.