It was the newly six-year-old’s birthday party yesterday. I booked a package at a local community centre that provides party leaders, games for 45 minutes in a gym, and a private room with tables and chairs for lunch and cake after the games. The party leaders did all the decorating and clean-up afterwards, as well! I organized most of the food for the random assortment of around 20 kids, aged between 4 and 6, and their parents. Which meant providing stuff the kids would eat, and stuff the parents would eat.
One thing I discovered a couple of years ago: most kids love grape tomatoes and sugar snap peas, even if some insist on opening the latter and only eating the miniature peas inside. Those all disappeared quickly again. The cheesy crackers went, the grain+seed gluten-free crackers were mostly ignored. The adults loved the walnut-olive tapenade (recipe from Eat Like a Dinosaur: Recipe & Guidebook for Gluten-free Kids) but the kids mostly ignored it. They went for the mini bagels with strawberry cream cheese instead; the occasional kid preferred the the plain cream cheese. My husband made 70 small chicken kebabs which I paired with the “not peanut sauce” almond-butter based satay sauce from Paleo Comfort Foods: Homestyle Cooking for a Gluten-Free Kitchen (since there are a few kids with peanut allergies in the group). Some of the kids ate the kebabs, the parents ate a lot, and the remaining few were polished off by the party helpers after the kids and parents had had their fill. I also made carrot-beetroot fritters (those are beets for you North Americans), which the parents liked and the kids mostly ignored. I thought they were good, and even better with a dollop of tzatziki on them.
For dessert we had store-bought miniature cookies, and my son made marshmallow lollipops. Let’s see, sugar, coated with sugary white chocolate and dipped in even more sugar? What 6‑year-old could resist? Very few, as it turned out, although a couple of kids in the group don’t really like sweet things and turned down the marshmallows. These were the same kids who turned down birthday cake afterwards.
The birthday cake was a basic minimal-flour chocolate cake, with lots of frosting and sprinkles. I like these basic cake recipes; they’re the sort where when the cake is almost done you can turn off the oven and leave it overnight to finish and cool down. Light sponges that need precise timing are too much work I find; things happen and I don’t get back to the oven in time and they’re dry and horrible. A dense, rich cake has a lot more leeway in terms of baking, and a small piece goes a long way as well.
Afterwards, the kids all piled out the door to the lawn outside the community centre and ran around for half an hour, a lovely end to a fun party. As I’m writing this, my daughter is having a long nap, recovering from all the excitement! And we still have lots of cake, satay sauce, and a few fritters in the fridge.