Easy Event Ideas

Hello again lovely readers.  Part two of my beach theme party food series is focusing on deserts.  For this party I made a beach ball cake, beach cup cakes, and a beach dessert which is blue jello and a pudding dessert.  Here’s how I did it!

Beach Ball Cake

First thing you need to make a ball shaped cake is a ball shaped pan of course! You can get one of Wilton’s Sport’s Ball Pans in most craft stores or on amazon. Use your favorite cake recipe or regular old store mix and follow the directions inside the pan box for baking. It will also instruct you on cutting the cake so you can put the layers together. For the frosting if you want to pipe it like I did I would suggest making your own it stays so much better than store bought frosting and tastes better too! If you want a good frosting recipe look below:

Frosting Ingredients

Serving Size: 3 Cups- I would probably make at least 3 batches for your cake and cupcakes.

• 1⁄2cup vegetable shortening
• 1⁄2cup softened butter
• 1 teaspoon wilton clear vanilla extract
• 4 cups sifted confectioners’ sugar
• 2 tablespoons milk or water

Decorating Instructions

• With a serrated knife, slice a small piece of cake off rounded side of one half so that, when assembled, cake will sit level.
• Ice smooth or cover this trimmed area with tip 16 white stars. Place this half with trimmed side down on serving plate. Make a dam on top of this half by squeezing out a band of icing about 3/4 in. high around the edge. With spatula, spread icing, jam, pudding or other filling in center.
• Mix your frosting with you desired food colors. Around a half a cup of frosting for each color.
• Position top half to form ball. Lightly ice cake in thinned white icing. Mark Beach Ball pattern with toothpick.
• Use tip 3, frosting bags, and white icing to outline panels of ball. If you’d like to have lines in between your colors
• Use tip 16 and a colored frosting to fill in some panels with stars.
• Continue with each panel until your ball is complete.
• Frosting under the ball is difficult I’m not going to lie!

Beach Cup Cakes

For your cupcakes use another cake mix or your favorite cake recipe and make a batch of cupcakes.  For decorating your beach scenes you will need creativity and the following:

• Frosting (store bought or home made is fine)
• Gummy Bears
• Swedish Fish
• Fruit by the foot (to cut up as beach blankets)
• Life Savers (gummy ones are better if you can find them)
• Gold Sprinkles or crushed vanilla wafers 
• Cocktail Umbrella’s

What ever you have left over you can use to make beach dessert or put out at a snack table in sand pails and let people take them home as a treat!

Beach Sand and Water Dessert

For this fun dessert I combined this sand pudding recipe and regular blue jello into a 9 x 13 in pan.  To do this you first need to make your blue jello packet I used a double batch recipe.  Before I poured it into my pan I placed a 9 x 8 in pan inside of my 9 x 13 in pan at one side so that I could create room for my sand. I also made my jello about 3 hrs before I started to make my sand so that it had enough time to set so I could remove the smaller pan and add my sand into the larger pan in it’s place.  While the jello was setting I added Swedish Fish to the mix so that they appeared to be swimming.  They didn’t hold up incredibly well and I don’t really think they were needed. After the Jello set I removed the smaller pan, cut away any jello around the edges and, I put my sand inside the dish.  And decorated with all of my yummy snacks that I used for the cupcakes above.  To see how to make the sand please read below.

Ingredients

• 1(15 ounce) package vanilla wafers
• 2 Oreo cookies
• 8 ounces cream cheese
• 1⁄4cup butter
• 2⁄3cup powdered
• 2(3 1/2 ounce) packages French vanilla pudding mix
• 2 3⁄4cups milk
• 12 ounces  Cool Whip

Directions