Happy New Year! I’m not sure where January went but it’s all been a bit of a blur for me recently with Christmas, holidays, school, after school activities, house guests, and of course birthday parties. Both of my kids’ birthdays are at this time of year.
To celebrate my daughter’s 10th birthday, Anna’s Ice Cream Party Parlour opened for business for one day only! Excuse the Australian spelling of parlor!
We originally planned to keep her party pretty casual and simply invite some of her friends to the local ice cream shop for an ice cream after school one afternoon. But then, as these things tend to do, it somehow evolved into Anna’s Ice Cream Party Parlor being opened!
Invitations from my Ice Cream Party Printables were sent out to Anna’s friends. I don’t think many kids can resist the idea of being able to create your own ice cream sundaes!
I didn’t have any envelopes on hand to fit the invitations, however I found some plain white folders in my cupboard that I trimmed down and glued the invitation to the inside. I used the printable party tags in the collection as address labels on the front and and the mini labels as extra decoration tied to twine.
I designed the Ice Cream Party Parlour Banner background to match the invitations and other printable decor and had it printed on vinyl. It was the perfect backdrop for the ice cream toppings and mix-ins table.
We had lots of toppings for the girls to get creative with, Wafers, M&M’s, White Toblerone pieces, Crumble topping, crushed pretzels, candies, candy bananas, coconut and more.
Sprinkles, honeycomb, milo, crushed meringue, oreo pieces and more!
Marshmallows, whipped cream and of course sauces. Passionfruit, caramel, chocolate and strawberry! All labeled with the food labels from my Ice Cream Party Printables of course 🙂
The girls claimed their favorite topping was the passionfruit sauce, but it was all of the little ball candies, oreo pieces, meringues & marshmallows that had disappeared at the end of the party!
Anna loves to make cupcakes, so she decided that instead of a cake, she wanted to make some cute mini cupcakes. We figured that everyone wouldn’t really want to have a full piece of birhday cake anyway after all the ice cream and sweets (some couldn’t even fit in the cupcake)!
They thought this sign was quite funny.
This large printed coloring-in sheet was the only decoration on the table. The girls could color in and write on it as they were eating.
After they made their sundaes we played the mystery ingredient game. I gave one of the above scratch-it cards to each girl. Only one of the cards had “YOU WIN Congratulations” and the rest had “SORRY Try Again”. Whoever scratched off the winning card had to include my mystery ingredient in her ice cream sundae.
That was the mystery ingredient (a candy eyeball) suitably gross enough for 10yr olds (but easily removed if they didn’t want to eat it).
We did three rounds of this game, but I wish I had printed off more of the cards as this was lots of fun (and you can get the girls involved in selecting the mystery ingredient for the ‘winner’ too!).
I purchased and used the Silver 2″ x 1″ Rectangle Scratch Off Labels from www.myscratchofflabels.com for these cards and they worked really well.
To give the girls something else to do, I used the Ice Cream cone image from my collection and created a sheet of Ice Cream cones to print on blank sheets of Shrinky Dink paper. Once printed, I cut out each ice cream shape and used a regular sized hole punch to make the hole at the top.
The girls colored in the shrinky dinks ice cream charms and I shrunk them in the oven. I cannot believe how much they LOVED watching these shrink!
For 10 girls, I had about 70 shrinky dinks ice cream charms (plus some with their names on it) and had bought a cord necklace and a bracelet each.
I purchased the special Shrinky Dink paper and ooked a little silver loop through the hole and the girls threaded them on their necklace or bracelet to create their own ice cream jewellery.
Ice Cream Party favors were simple and easy to organize. I packaged up some mini Mars Bars, Bounty’s and Snickers Bars in cello bags and closed them with the 4inch wide toppers in my Ice Cream Party Printables.
If I was a bit more organised I would have preferred to send these Make Some Ice Cream kits home as the party favors, but I put these together at the last minute and didn’t have enough for all of the girls. We ended up using them at the party instead.
I found a few recipes online for how to make ice cream at home with just milk, ice, rock salt, sugar & vanilla.
I prepackaged some rock salt and sugar in the little tubs and then tied some ziploc bags in twine with the Ice Cream Recipe. All the girls needed to do was fill up the inner ziploc bags with some milk, the sugar and vanilla (optional), seal it well and place it in the larger ziploc bag together with some ice and the salt and then shake like mad.
They had lots of fun throwing, shaking, and smashing this around until the mixture inside resembled ice cream (it takes about 10 minutes). Given their rough treatment of the bags, I was pleased I had double bagged the innner ziploc too! You could replace the large ziploc bags with mason jars for a more elegant presentation (and it might be easier and more effective to shake a jar too!).
Anna had such a fun time at her party. I hope we have given you some fun ideas for when you open your Ice Cream Party Parlor too!
You can purchase my Ice Cream Party Printables in the shop for $12.95 HERE.