One of the things I was busy doing last week was planning/decorating for my brother and SIL’s baby shower which was on Saturday at my mom’s house. Their favorite book is “Ender’s Game,” which they are naming their baby after, so I tried to incorporate the book into the baby shower theme without getting too weird about it (Manda wanted to make everything ALIENS!). Instead of going full Battle School, I went with stars and a couple images of Ender.
As always, I started with a sketch to plan out the colors and items on the dessert table. I have never created one of these tables before, so I did lots of research on the internet first!
The real thing had a few changes, but overall, I thought it was funny how the drawing translated to real life!
So, the ginormous watercolor on the wall doesn’t really go with the theme, but, you know, you don’t touch your mama’s ginormous watercolor.
Manda helped with a lot of the decorating the night before, hanging stars, stringing streamers. It was a lot of fun! I told her she should start a party-planning company, and I’d work for her. She said I should start the company, and she’d work for me. I told her I was tired of being the boss!!!
I tried to name the desserts with Ender’s Game themes. The thing is, I have never read the book, and I didn’t have time to read the book. I put out a call of HELP on Twitter and was really lucky that Brie had read the book five times and sent me a long and informative email! Thank you!! I also ordered the first Ender’s Game graphic novel and scanned an image of Ender for the cupcake toppers, which I printed out and hot glued to tiny dowels from Michaels.
I made mini-pancake lollipops because (a) my brother loves pancakes and (b) I’d recently seen a post somewhere about these minis, and it just seemed perfect. Here’s the recipe I used from No. 2 Pencil. I was having trouble flipping my pancakes with the sticks, so I made the pancakes without them and stuck the sticks in afterwards. My batter was thick, so my mini pancakes remained thick, and poking the stick in was no problem. I could see that if the pancakes were too thin, you’d just wreck them with the stick later! Clearly, mine didn’t turn out as pretty, but they were still really yummy.
I chose peach-flavored candies because my sister-in-law likes peach gummies, and also owls! The little foil-wrapped lollipop stands are just styrofoam balls cut in half. I had tons of leftover styro balls from building my Renegade booth last Christmas.
Instead of buying individual bottles of sparking lemonade and adding food coloring to match the colors, we went with one jug of un-colored sparkling lemonade with fresh mint leaves.
Hairy also made a giant batch of paella as requested by my mom.
I kinda knew we would have a lot of candy leftover because lollipops sort of seem more like a little-kids thing, but I liked what they added to the table aesthetically! The PB&J sandwich stars and the pancake pops seemed to the most popular items. If I ever create a dessert table again, I definitely need take the time to work more with different vertical heights for everything, but overall, I was happy with the way everything turned out and thought it looked very cheerful.
The Ender’s Game movie is coming out later this year, so if you don’t have time to read the book either, you can check out the film!
