A Little Shopping on Etsy for the Skylanders Birthday Party

In August, I hosted my son's 7th birthday party and as you know from following my blog, the theme this year was Skylanders.  Unclear on what that means?  Skylanders is an interactive game where the figurine of each Skylander comes to life through the Portal of Power and the player can then manipulate that character on the screen through various video game systems (we use the Wii, but it can be played on XBOX, Playstation, etc).  It's pretty cool, actually.  You can read all about Skylanders at www.skylanders.com.

There aren’t a lot of party supplies out in the market yet for Skylanders, like what you would find at Party City.  So I headed to Etsy to do some shopping when I started to plan this.  For the invitations, I found these very cool Skylander cards from DenimGraphics, pictured here.  My son was able to choose the Skylander he wanted to feature on his invitation and then I provided the details to create it.  What I purchased was an image that I could print myself or take somewhere to be printed.  She also offered a print option through her store, so I went that route.  When they arrived I was so pleased!  They looked great – printed, cut, and ready to go with envelopes included.

 

To add a personalized touch to the decorations, I purchased images to make a banner from Kid Invitations.  This came out looking great!  I decided that I could handle taking these to Office Max for the printing.  After cutting them, I added larger orange circles to each of them, hole punched, and assembled with twine. 

 

 

 I also found some very cute personalized party favor tags from Lulu Cole on Etsy.  Again, this was an image I purchased and these went with me to Office Max for printing.  Then they just needed to be cut out, hole punched, and tied to our party favors.  

Each of these Etsy stores provided me with excellent customer service and quick turnaround times – for which I was very grateful!  What shopping on Etsy have you done?

How to Build a Skylanders Portal of Power Birthday Cake

For my son's 7th birthday this year, we threw him a Skylanders Birthday Party and what took center stage was the Portal of Power Birthday Cake!

Portal of Power Cake

I was completely inspired by the cake from Amy's Party Ideas and when my son saw the picture of her cake, he knew he wanted the same.

This post is to describe the approach I took to assemble this cake.  It was much easier than anticipated.  I was hesitant to go down the path of fondant again after last year's Power Rangers Samurai Birthday Cake, but I knew I needed to overcome this fear. 

One the day I started, my son brought the real Portal of Power and said "Here is a resource for you, Mommy" - he's awesome!

The cake itself was a straightforward, store bought, milk chocolate cake.  After baking and cooling, I took a serrated bread knife to even out the tops of each cake.  I placed the first cake, bottom side down on the cake plate and gave it a basic crumb coat.  Oh - and I was using store bought frosting too!  I am a fan of the Betty Crocker Whipped products.  I also added (what I thought was) a lot of frosting to the top of the first cake, which would eventually become the middle.  But - it could have definitely used more.

The next cake went right on top, but this time, the bottom of the cake was on top.  I wanted to have the entire cake indent in the middle to give it more of the look of the Portal of Power.  A crumb coat topped that cake as well.  This sat overnight, sealed, and waiting for fondant.

I learned last year that I will never make a large quantity of fondant again and I found this relatively decent buttercream fondant from Duff.  It's easy to use, colors easily (if needed), and tastes pretty good.  I purchased white and before using a small amount of black gel coloring from Wilton to achieve the grey color I needed for the stones.  Before doing that, I rolled out a thin circle of plain white to put on top of the cake.  I took the reserves from that circle and handed it over to my girlfriend.  She used the Portal of Power resource to free hand cut out the various images that are around the Portal. 

Once that was complete, I rolled out a massive sheet of the grey fondant.  With the help of my bestie who was in town for the celebration, we started to create grey rectangles that would go around the entire cake.  I measured the length I would need and started cutting the rectangles.  These were transferred to a piece of parchment paper where she took the smallest square cutter to make light indentations in the stone.  Once we had a large batch, we lightly sprayed them with black Color Mist Food Spray.

At this point, I probably should have added more frosting to the cake, just based upon feedback from the guests.  Instead of using that as the "glue", I simply dabbed on a bit of water to the back of each rectangle and begin going around the cake until it was complete. 

Next I made 8 thicker rectangles to go over the base and slightly further onto the top of the cake.

Lastly, we took our 8 images from the Portal and again using a little bit of water, applied them to the cake.

Skylanders Birthday Party

For my son's 7th birthday, he wanted to have a Skylanders Party.  Unclear on what this means?  Skylanders is an interactive game where the figurine of each Skylander comes to life through the Portal of Power and the player can then manipulate that character on the screen through various video game systems (we use the Wii, but it can be played on XBOX, Playstation, etc).  It's pretty cool, actually. You can read all about Skylanders at www.skylanders.com.

I did some shopping on Etsy for party supplies - you can read more details here about my "shopping trip".  For the invitations, I found these very cool Skylander cards through DenimGraphics.

 

I also purchased files to create the personalized banner and favor tags from Kid Invitations and Lulu Cole, respectively.

For the cake (and favors!), I was inspired by Amy's Party Ideas blog post on the Skylanders Birthday she styled.  It was a lot easier than I expected to be and even got to have my BFF in town to help me decorate it!  Make sure you check out this blog post for step by step instructions on how to build your own Portal of Power cake!

For the food, I asked my son to help me make the menu based on what the Skylanders eat....so it was pretty random.  Then we took names of various Skylanders and made cards to go along with each item.  We served:  Pop Fizz's PB&J, Warnado's Watermelon, Tree Rex's Tacos (using my Crockpot Chicken Tacos), Prism Break's Pretzels, Cynder's Cinnamon Rolls, Chop Chop's Cheese, Eruptor's Eggs, and Ghost Roaster's Grapes.

Our party colors were geared towards the packaging of all of the Skylanders merchandise - and their logo of course. 

For entertainment, we hired "Tim the Balloon Guy".  We met him a few years ago as he is at the Chick-fil-a Family Fun nights and have hired him for some of our past parties.  He's quite talented - he made lots of Skylanders, bows and arrows, shields, masks, dogs, flowers, and even a Minnie Mouse.  A friend of mine shared a photo of the Skylander Hot Head with me that he took with his iPhone - it was impressive!  I took the other one of a party guest fully ready for battle!

We also played a game that my son came up with - "Pin The Tail On Spyro".  I found an image of Spyro along with the Skylanders logo and did a little work in Photoshop to merge them together and remove his tail.  I had it printed at Office Max on an 18" x 24" piece of paper.  Then I used Photoshop again to just get the image of the tail and printed those on card stock for the kids to use. 

Finally, for the party favors, I made white chocolate Wii remotes using this candy mold.  Once they were slipped into a bag, tied with colorful ribbon and a personalized favor tag attached, they were the perfect parting gift for our guests.

My son and I had a lot of fun planning this party together.  I hope he'll want to continue to plan future parties with me!