Birthday Cupcakes

My son celebrated his 4th birthday in advance on Tuesday at his preschool together with six other children.  Every year, I have one big project i.e. my son's birthday.  Papa is not in favour of throwing a birthday bash for our little boy.  Hence, every year, he would celebrate together with his classmates at the preschool. Thereafter, we will have a mini one with our family members.  Last year, he had it at the Singapore Zoo "Breakfast with Orang Utan".  This year, I planned it at the Jurong Bird Park, "Lunch with the Parrots".  Interestingly, my boy adores animals more than cars.  When we talked about going to these two places, his eyes instantly light up and hopping around the house like a rabbit.  

I made chocolate cupcakes this year with the 'Jake and the Neverland Pirates' edible image that I ordered from Reeney's baking supplies.  This is also a special request from my son.  And he also got his wish to put on a red headscarf pretending to be the 'Jake', the pirate.  This is my first attempt baking cupcakes and I would say, the buttercream icing, is awfully sweet.  But the kids love it and savour every bit of it. The receipe I used is from Joy of Baking.  Usually, I would reduce the amount of sugar by 20% or more for all my baking.  And I did it for the chocolate cake except for the icing (in order to get the right consistency to pipe on the cupcake.)  I have a couple of sleepless night searching the correct size of cupcake case and boxes and worrying about the end result.  Moreover, I began to train my boy to sleep in his room but every nights, he would wake me up to sleep together with him.  But my efforts pay off, he is finally able to sleep alone in his own room without waking up in the middle of night looking for me.  Hooray!  Okay, I digress a little...  Continue the birthday..  Besides the cupcakes, I also bought 7 Mickey Mouse and Minnie stationery set to be given to each and every kids.  And I also promised him to twist balloons for everyone.  I managed to do a few simple balloons like pirate sword, doggie, giraffe and hummingbird which I learned from internet.  Lastly, I enlisted my Mom's help to buy a box of chocolate in the shape of gold coins from Sheng Siong (because I could not find any in all the candy stores!).  This is to match the theme; pirates and gold doubloons.  My hubby teased that it is too much for me to handle.  But I had proved him wrong because I did it! 

On that day, children were excited over the colourful cupcakes and each got to choose their preferred choice of image.  The funniest thing was they peeled the edible image off thinking it was sticker.  They just love the buttercream icing!  And my greedy son has two cupcakes at one go!  They were so happy they too received a little gift and gold doubloons from the birthday boy.   Oh, yes, the balloons!  Everyone went crazy over the balloons.  One of his classmate, Jake, was eyeing the balloons and politely asked me  "Excuse me, can I have the blue dog?" when  everybody were too busy eating their cupcakes to notice it.  Clever!

It was a wonderful birthday despite it lasted only 30 minutes.  Most importantly, my son and his friends had a fun and great day!