Pirate Party Part 3 - The cake & food ideas

Pirate Theme Party for Dimples 3rd Birthday - The Treasure Chest Cake, the food ideas & inspiration.

The Treasure Chest Cake-

The Cake was a Chocolate swirl Cake that I made the night before the Party.  A Treasure Chest Cake!

This where I got the inspiration from Treasure Chest Cake recipe . With a little of my own twist of course. I used a cake board from Spotlight as the base, brown sugar as the sand with some real shells, and a smaller cake board as the base of the lid.

First I made the rectangle cake & sliced the rounded top off, it fit perfectly on top of the lid cake board. That was the first part done easily, a layer of frosting on the board (as glue) to stick on the cake, and then the cake top got covered with frosting. I used licorice as 2 straps over the top & wrote Happy Birthday over the lid then put it to the side while I did the tricky bit. I frosted the bottom of the treasure chest around all the sides and a border around the inside.

The Treasure consisted of gold chocolate coins, small jelly belly jelly beans, baby M&M's, some scull Candy's in bright colours, some candy bracelets and a few lolly rings. Lots of sugar & bright colours.

Then using writing icing I put on a key hole at the front & some more straps from licorice.
The hardest part was the balancing act- Using some skews and tooth picks I placed the lid on top. If you are attempting this my advice is to leave your cake refrigerated over night in separate pieces so that it sets and is harder, it wont work if you have a soft warm cake, then set & balance it right before serving it.

Dimples just wanted to take all the ring lolly pops from the treasure.

Food-
I printed up some black, red and white labels and thought up some Pirate theme names to re-name everything.  Everything seems more interesting when it is renamed into Pirate Jargon.

Shark Jewels fruit salad.
Served in a shark head watermelon with blueberries, grapes and watermelon balls to resemble jewels.

Candy Bar
Pirates teeth; baby marshmellows, caramel popcorn.
Cannon Balls; Maltesser chocolates and red jaffer chocolates.
Sharks Bait; Sour worms and snakes.

NOW, just a quick warning. I didn't take many set photos of the lay out and food although i wish i had have programmed my brain to do this. But after the party had started my blogging senses just flew out the window and then after looking back at pictures, I thought to myself  'why don't I have any pictures of the themed food". I had put a lot of time and effort finding themed food to serve and then, nothing!  So another word of advice to an party throwers, take a photo of everything before its party time & little hands scramble all over the place.

Anyway, I can only explain what my ideas were and show you my inspiration. Here goes,

Ships lost at sea;
These were blue jelly, layered with whipped cream to represent the rough ocean inspired by these and these neat boats  on top were orange slices made of jelly with pirate flags to represent boats (like these stripy-jelly-orange-wedges- )

We had "Sea Water" & "Pirates Punch" in jugs, as well as a blow up Pirate boat full of toddler pops and soda for the adults.

Octopus Dip-
Using the top off a Capsicum stuck in dip, I cut out Octopus eyes and 8 legs, the dip was centred in the middle of the plate and surrounding it was sliced carrot, celery, gherkins, cucumber and crackers.
Inspired by octopus-dip-recipe

Squid-
Little Frankfurt's sliced with "squid" legs, served with tomato sauce to dip in.
like the ones shown here on squidoo.com

Sail away sandwich's-
Shaped from a Pirate boat cookie cutter we had sandwich's
Devon & sauce,
ham & cheese
chicken, cheese & mayo
Vegemite.

Pirates Grub-
On top of this I cooked up some Sea shanties, some curly fries and some calamari rings.