Success!

I'm tempted to have a t-shirt made up that says, "I survived the Great Seventh Birthday Party of 2009." A good time was had by all, Mother Nature played nice with the weather, the pizza was great, the cupcake kebabs were a hit, and I didn't get a sunburn!

I learned a few things about assembling the cupcake kebabs that I will pass on should any of you be masochistic enough to want to make them. This is what I started out with:



The cupcakes I had made one batch a night during the week: dark chocolate fudge with milk chocolate icing, funfetti with lemon icing, and red velvet with classic white frosting. The the vanilla cookie wafers and caramel-vanilla marshmallows I picked up at Target.

• Marshmallows have to go on the ends of the skewers - the stickiness of the marshmallows helps to anchor them in place
• The vanilla wafer cookies are spacers between the cupcakes so they don't all squish together - you have to gently screw into them with the point end of the skewer so asto not split them (a few wafer cookies made their way into my belly that way)
• Keep the cupcakes cool - either refrigerate or freeze them until almost ready to serve - the icing wants to slide off the cupcakes when they are sideways in the pan if they come up to room temperature.

After all that... enjoy!

I trimmed the length of the skewers to remove the point end and shorten them so they would fit into the tray and I could snap the lid back on.

I'm really happy that people liked them:



People had lots of different eating techniques, from eating them like corn on the cob, to eating from the top going down, to simply sliding everything off the skewer and eating the component pieces separately.

And some, like Ray, just got them in his mouth any which way he could:



Whew... 359 days to rest before the next monster arrives...