First Birthday Fun

With Maddy's birthday fairly close to Thanksgiving, we decided to wait and have her first birthday party over Thanksgiving vacation. My brother & sister-in-law live several hours away and really wanted to be there for her party, so we had a small celebration on the day of her birthday, but the big bash was a few weeks later.

Bryan had his final cyclocross race of the season on her birthday, which was a Sunday. We made some tie-dye looking cupcakes to celebrate with our "bike" friends.  Maddy had one when we got home.  The first couple tastes were good, but as you can see by the second pictures, she wasn't a fan for long.  Later on, we realized that she was getting hand-foot-mouth (for the 2nd time!).

Maddy's birthday party theme was a simple, girly theme.  It was supposed to be a cherry theme, but it didn't turn out quite that way.  Her smash cake turned out really neat and was actually pretty easy.  The directions of how to frost it can be found here.  I made cupcakes for the rest of the family.  They were soooo yummy!  Cherry-Almond-Vanilla cupcakes.  They had a maraschino cherry inside (I made half of them w/o the cherry).  I personally liked it without the cherry.  They were also supposed to have a cherry on top for decoration, but the frosting got runny and weird looking, so I skipped that part.  Here's the link for the cupcakes.  For a party decoration, I made a banner of Maddy's pictures from each month.  It was probably my favorite part of the whole preparation process for her party!

I still can't believe our little "Puddin' Pie" is one!  She looked like such a princess in her birthday dress. Even with cake and frosting all over her!