Sweet Shop Party

The idea of a child’s birthday party fills me with dread! However, I think turning 5 is pretty special, and with my second daughter in her first year at school with some lovely new friends it seemed like a good idea to organise a celebration for her.

My daughter absolutely loves chocolate and is a big fan of Charlie and the Chocolate Factory – so the thought crossed my mind – how amazing would it be to have a chocolate factory themed party for her?...  Now, if I were Heston, this would not be a problem but I couldn’t envisage how to get a chocolate river into the local scout hut!  So I went off at a slight tangent and hit upon the idea of ‘a kid in a sweet shop’.  I am one of those mean mums who doesn’t let her children eat sweets very often, so this would be a real treat indeed!

So to set the tone, I made edible invitations to a ‘Sweet Shop Party’.  Using edible ink I hand stamped about 30 sheets of rice paper and sent them off for her to give to her friends.  I then sat down to plan how to bring this idea into reality.

As we weren’t going to have a birthday tea in the more traditional sense, I wondered about how to lay out the hall.  I purchased a bright pink gazebo with zip-up doors to form the basis of the shop.  This meant that I had some control of when the shop was ‘opened’ at the party.  We effectively split the hall into quarters and had 4 different areas for use during the party – the sweet shop, a bouncy castle, some balloon modelling and a badge making area.

In the sweet shop, we had a giant box of popcorn, a ‘gumball’ machine filled with clementines, a lollypop ‘tree’, a marshmallow ‘tree’ and a table covered with jars of sweets and dried fruit.

So at 2pm the party started and 25 of my daughter’s friends joined us.  They had great fun on the bouncy castle and making a badge each before we opened the sweet shop.   Some of them didn’t reappear from the sweet shop for a good long while!  It soon became clear that my visions of sending them home with a bag of ‘leftover’ sweets was not going to happen.  The giant homemade jelly babies were probably the first to go and one little boy was totally fascinated by the gumball machine!

I do think that most children love the idea of sweets more than the actual sweets.  One of my daughter’s was seen sitting on the little table demolishing a jar of dried cranberries with a look on her face that suggested she couldn’t believe her luck!

By the time the birthday girl had blown out the candles on her special princess cake and I had been brave enough to make everyone a balloon animal, the two hours had flown by and it was time to go.  The birthday girl and her friends seemed to have a fantastic time and I dare say (albeit very quietly) I quite enjoyed it.

We sell a range of party items at MOMD.  This party bunting is made to order so can have any message you want.  A really fabulous special touch: http://www.madeonmydoorstep.co.uk/category-42/001023.html