Happy Birthday Dr. Suess!

Theodor Seuss Geisel-born March 2nd, 1904, was an American author, political cartoonist, poet, animator, book publisher, and artist, best known for authoring more than 60 children's books under the pen name Doctor Seuss. He has written some spectacular books that we read around this house often. Charlie's preschool is throwing a birthday party for Dr. Seuss to celebrate his special day and this girl is in charge of the goodies! So we're off to a great place-the kitchen! First I did some of my usual pinteresting and googling to get some ideas. There are 30 kids in Charlie's Friday "Kindergarten-prep" class and several teachers. I will be making 4 dozen to split between his class and 'taste-testing.' I've decided to do a chocolate cupcake with vanilla frosting.

I am going to do 3 different decorations to keep the decorations fun and colorful for a guy who clearly appreciated color. We will be doing: "Green Eggs"-Green baking cup with green frosting, and candy melt "egg and ham" decoration "The Lorax"-Orange baking cup with orange frosting, and candy melt "Lorax" face "One Fish, Two Fish."-Blue baking cup, yellow frosting and 2 swedish fish

1. I like to get prep done early so I decided to tackle the candy melt decorations on Sunday since Eric would be home with the kids too. I printed out the templates from the website for the Lorax face and the eggs and ham.

To make candy melt decorations, you want to first gather your materials. I use a sheet of parchment, the printed stencil, a sheet pan, the candy melts and squirt bottles. I place the stencil on the sheet pan, then the parchment goes on top. I melt the candy melts in a coffee mug in the microwave and pour the liquid into the squirt bottle. I then outline the stencil and fill in. For the egg, I left a spot for the green yolk and filled them in when I did the green ham. For the green ham, I had a white dot for the bone then used a food-safe marker to get the black lines to mimic the ham in the book. The Lorax face was tough-I found that if I held the bottle away from the paper, I had more control to get more texture for the mustache and eyebrows. When they were all dried, I put them in a tupperware container and in the fridge until it's time to decorate!

2. Step 2 is to bake the cupcakes. I chose to do chocolate for all since the motto at preschool is "you get what you get and you don't get upset!" Charlie reminds me of this often.

3. Once the cupcakes are baked and cooled, it's time to make the frosting. I use this recipe with cold butter-I know that most call for softened but this recipe really holds up and that's important to me when I want a good base for decorations. I make 3x this amount and color each frosting individually. Then I piped the frosting on each cupcake.

4. These are beautiful (and COLORFUL!) cupcakes. Now it's time to add the fun details. Each Green Eggs and Ham cupcake gets one of each decoration. Each One Fish cupcake got 2 fish and the Lorax cupcakes got their faces on. 2 eyebrows, 1 mustache, 2 candy eyeballs and 1 orange m&m nose to complete the look. Now these are all done and packaged for the kids to celebrate!

5. As a bonus-take home! for the kids. I decided to whip up those sugar cookies I made for the Spriderman heart cookies but as the Cat in the Hat's Hat. I used a "floppy hat" cookie cutter I found on ebay. I made the dough, baked the cookies and gave them the day to rest. Then I decorated them with the same royal icing I used on the Spidey cookies but I did use Candy Melts for the borders and colored details. I used my new love-the food safe marker to include all the details from the books I could find. I hope the kids enjoy their Dr. Suess Birthday party!!!

Thanks for helping us celebrate an important person in literature, Dr. Seuss! It's been a rough mental few weeks thinking about my kids and school with all that is going on. The Stoneman Douglas shooting was just another reminder of how unsafe the world is for my children. It's so hard to accept that as a parent, I am willing to do anything for them. I would stand in front of a bullet for them. I can teach them about tolerance and how to appreciate the differences in others and not judge them. I can monitor their mental health, access to weapons and surround them with people who have their best interest at heart. I hate that no matter how much I work at trying to provide them a safe, healthy and happy environment, there are still things outside of my control that could cause them harm. I feel so heartbroken for those families who sent their child to a 'safe place' only to never have that child return home. School was always a safe space growing up for me. My mom worked at my elementary school and our small community at Divine Child was sheltered-in more ways than one. I hope if we all do better at trying to keep expanding our understandings of other people and accept people for who they are and help those who need help, we can bring an end to the terror. Let's just be BETTER human beings.