Mad Hatter Tea Party

Both Lily and Maddie are both into the Ever After High characters and books.  They've read them all.  Watched everything online.  Bought all the dolls (and they NEVER play with dolls).  They've both decided to be Madeline Hatter for Halloween.

So that led us to their birthday.  They liked the idea of a Wonderland-style tea party, so we went with that.  We decided to have the party at our house in the garage.

I started by getting tea cups from local thrift shops.  It was a little harder than I thought, and I ended up paying too much at the flea market for the nicest cups.  The idea was that the kids could take them as party favors, but in the mad rush of pickup only about 5 or so did.

The girls made a direction-less sign for the driveway.

We dyed marshmallows to make Cheshire Cat Tales.  Where they were resting on wax paper to dry is where the color came off.  I should have tried nonstick drying racks.  The white rabbit egg holder came from one of our thrift store visits.

Drink Me.  I had ordered some chocolate tea from the Republic of Tea, but the biggest hit turned out to be Davidson's French Vanilla tea, with lots of cream and sugar added.




For cake, I attempted to make a topsy-turvey Mad Hatter cake.  In addition to the complicated layering, this was my first time working with fondant.  Smoothing it down was a bit challenging, but I covered the imperfections with the dots.  The top layer was rainbow-colored cake batter, and the bottom was 4 layers of alternating chocolate and vanilla.  There's no pictures of the cut cake because gravity pretty much took over as I cut it.

We had a fabulous magician play the role of our Mad Hatter.  If you're looking for children's entertainment in the Triangle area, I highly recommend Happy Dan the Magic Man.