Party food for a Lalaloopsy and Hello Kitty themed party

Hello party food!!  I put more thought and effort (and sweat—eww, gross, but true!) into the actual food for this party than I usually do.  I’m talking about real food, other than the dessert stuff!!  And when I say sweat, I mean it, because I spent a couple of hours over a hot stove top boiling pasta!  It’s easy to make colored pasta, and I found 2 shapes that fit our party theme perfectly:  scoobi doo (that’s what the package said!) and farfalle (bows).

When you are boiling the water for pasta, just add some food coloring to your salted water.  I started with pink…some pink and some red food coloring….for the bows.  I just boiled them for a bit more than the time that was on the package, so for about 14 minutes.  The first batch was a light pink color.  Instead of draining the pasta, I fished it out with a slotted spoon, so that I could save the water.  I added more red food coloring to make a second batch of darker pink bow ties.  When the pasta was cooked, I added just a bit of olive oil so the pasta wouldn’t stick together when it cooled off.  I was pretty pleased with them!!  I saved some little bows to top the round jam sandwiches that we served the girls, for a cute “hello kitty” look.  I had wanted to cut out the sandwiches to look like hello kitty’s face, but don’t have a cutter for that!!

I made 2 batches of the scoobi do noodles (I’m sure they have another name, but I don’t know what it is!!) and made one orange and one yellow.   These noodles really look like the lalaloopsy doll hair!  I had thought of mixing this pasta in with the bows, that’s why I didn’t do any pink “hair” but didn’t end up doing that.  I made 2 different pasta salads, one with a vinagrette dressing and veggies, and the other one with a creamy yoghurt dressing and cheese and ham.  I thought that would kind of cover the bases….here are the recipes I used:Hello Bow Pasta Salad ingredients:

farfalle pasta (bow tie) colored 2 shades of pink

little cucumbers, sliced (the ones used for making pickles)

cherry tomatoes sliced in half

a bit of chopped parsley (optional)

Italian salad dressing

I’m not giving measurements, because it’s easy to guess, depending on how much salad you want to make.  I didn’t need very much, so about 3 cucumbers and a handful of cherry tomatoes.  I made extra bow ties for garnishes.  Here’s the Italian dressing recipe I used, I found the recipe on Food.com here.  I didn’t need very much for the salad, so I saved it and a few days later, used it as a marinade for some baked potato fries, good!!

Italian Dressing Recipe:

1/2 cup olive oil
2 tablespoons minced onions
1 tablespoon grated Parmesan cheese
1 teaspoon salt
3/4 teaspoon Worcestershire sauce
1 teaspoon granulated garlic powder  (I used less)
1/2 teaspoon dried basil leaves
3/4 teaspoon dried mustard
1/4 teaspoon dried oregano leaves
3/4 teaspoon sugar
1/2 teaspoon black pepper
1/4 cup cider vinegar (or white wine vinegar)
1 tablespoon lemon juice
Directions:
Combine all ingredients in blender and process 2 minutes. Don’t skip the blender and just stir it or shake it or it won’t be as good.

Chill at least 3 hours. It’s best if you make it a day ahead as it just gets better with age.  Mix into your pasta salad a bit at a time.

For this next salad I kind of followed the recipe for She Sells Seashells pasta here on Food.com.

Lalaloopsy Hair Pasta Salad:

ingredients:

2 colors of curly tube pasta

cubed mozzarella (I think cheddar would be better!)

diced honey ham

a few chopped green onions

For the dressing:  (approximately)

6 ounces plain yogurt
4 ounces ranch dressing
2 tablespoons apple cider vinegar
1 tablespoon honey

salt and pepper and dill to taste and a pinch of onion powder

Mix ingredients for dressing, add to pasta.  Then stir in ham, cheese cubes and green onion.

I think this salad could have used a bit more dressing!  I mean, I think I put too many noodles into it!

The salads turned out super-cute and quite tasty, I thought.  I don’t usually make salads, it’s not really “my thing” so I don’t think I’m very good at it.  The adults who tried the salads said they were good, the little girls……well, I wasn’t over-expecting!!  Some of them tried the salads, and a few of them actually ate the salads….so there were leftovers for the next day…yay!!  I forgot to get a shot of a pink plate full of salad and bow tie sandwiches, too cute!  Oh well, the food matched the Lalaloopsy/ Hello Kitty theme quite well!

Oh, by the way, I got the idea for coloring the pasta from this cool blog article called The Lorax Dinner Makeover.  I would love to add a cheesy sauce colored bright aqua to those colored pastas!!  But I thought that that might be just a bit much for the little girl party guests!!  😉

The Hello Kitty Party!! or “La Fiesta de la Hello”!

Yes, we have finally come to the Hello Kitty party itself! 🙂

I had been thinking for a long time that a Hello Kitty party would be fun, but here are the two things that made me feel really inspired to go ahead and go for it!!

this Hello Kitty chocolate “Easter egg”

and this Hello Kitty mug!

My photos of the mug didn’t turn out so great, but really the mugs were my inspiration for the party.  The girls have had them for years, and I am always seeing them!  The mugs have Hello Kitty with ice cream cones and candy, and they are done in these pastel colors.  So I decided that the colors for the party would be mint green, pastel pink and red, oh! and chocolate instead of black!  And that it would be a Hello Kitty Sweet Shoppe kind of theme!  Following are some easy how-tos for some of the Hello Kitty stuff we did for the party.  Links to sources and how-to posts are in red letters, so just click on them!

(An Aside:  my friend over at Paper Glitter did a Fab-U-Lous Hello Kitty Sweet Shoppe party for her daughter! It’s amazing!  I decided to go with my mug-inspired homemade party this time, though.  If my printer had been working, I would have printed some of Paper Glitters’ gorgeous Sweet Shoppe Party printouts and this sweeeeet stationary set!  Linnette makes the most adorable things for parties!  But my printer is on it’s last legs 😦  )

So mint and pink and red….and a little white cat!  A package of pastel card stock from the dollar store made a quick and easy backdrop.   Just tape the pages onto the wall with painter’s tape so they won’t stick forever! (We were able to print out one black and white kitty and my youngest colored it in.  We found it on this site of coloring pages).

The lighting in our house in the winter is just atrocious, and so all my photos look kinda strange…they look very brightly colored, but really are softer pastels, oh well, I guess you get the idea….

The little Kitty banner was so fast and easy to make. Check out the How-To here for a quick and easy Hello Kitty banner.

A trip to Party City for a few little party favors, and a trip to the T&T Asian supermarket for some fun Hello Kitty packs of gum and box of cookies!

At the dollar store, I found this cute little book of painting pages….(I must say the kids weren’t the only ones who had fun painting them!)

We set out a few of our Hello Kitty memorabilia to decorate…and something new….

And now for the party table set up!We found some bubble tea in just the right colors…they looked super, but just are not my personal cup of tea!  I made a plate of Hello Kitty crackers…um, those weren’t so fabulous, but might work out with a different recipe.Some easy party balloons in the shape of ice cream cones for the party table.  Just add some “cherries” and sprinkles!  There’s a quick how-to at the end of this post hereEverything was finally put together….with the Hello Kitty Cake, too!

I made a Pocky Cake and added Hello Kitty peeking over the top!  Her whiskers are made out of Pocky, too.  I posted about what a Pocky cake is the other day, what a quick way to decorate a cake!!The salad bowl was really a flash of genius, if I do say so myself!!  So fun and tasty, but super easy to make, too!

Here’s the post about the Hello Kitty Fruit Salad Bowl containing my favoritist sweet salad ever!  (I know that’s not a word! but it’s yummy)

My birthday girl!!!  No girl is ever too old for a Hello Kitty party!!It was a whole lot of sugary pastel colored sweetness, with a few Japanese and Korean treats thrown in!  The only things missing were these Hello Kitty strawberry treats!!  They were easy to make, but just didn’t make it to this party, haha!  The link for the how-to is here.

Hello Kitty Crackers….fail?

Back to Hello Kitty party stuff.  Here’s something I made for our party…but it looked like a fail to me (or failage, as my sons says, though not about the crackers necessarily).  Hello Kitty crackers seemed like a cool idea.  Something salty in the midst of so much sweetness.  I found several cracker recipes on Pinterest and decided to try this recipe for “homemade Ritz crackers” out, because it said if I halved the recipe I could fit it in a mini food processor.  Maybe that’s where the failage started…my mini processor was too full, so in the end had to lug out the bigger one.  And then I only had whole wheat flour, which of course gives things a different taste and texture (though I think we are used to that by now), and I thought it would be nice to add a bit of pink food coloring….anyways, the “crackers” seemed ok at first, but then I realized that they were kinda…weird.  I rolled them and cut them out…

Then I used the cutest little Hello Kitty play dough stamp to stamp faces into the crackers.  I even tried stamping it with food coloring, which looked like it had possibilities, but didn’t actually work…

The recipe said that holes should be poked in the crackers so they’d bake alright, so I did, poking Kitty’s nose and eyes with a meat thermometer (clean).

When they baked up…they still looked a little weird.  And when I tasted them…I wasn’t impressed.  They really just tasted like very flat biscuits.Some of them were kinda cute…though the pink color was strange.  I was surprised that the kids liked them!  The recipe might have been fine if I had not added whole wheat instead of white flour…. I definitely need to try this again, but will try a different recipe.  I think I’ll try a recipe that has cheese in it!