Dragon Fandango!

Karlie wanted a Dragon party. We have read The Care and Keeping of Dragons and she wants to own a mountain and raise a dragon or two. Ideas, ideas - it took some work but it worked out great and was a super success. I came up with the name because of a mix up with cascarones, fiestas & fandangos. In a way they all go together and it sounded good so we kept it. The cake turned out awesome! Karlie thought it should be a little more fierce but after Kaity turned it into a fire breathing dragon she decided it would do. I got my instructions here. I used vanilla cake mix and made homemade icing with this recipe. It turned out really yummy. I used snackwells cookies for the scaley back-bone, a jumbo marshmallow cut in half for the eyes with candy dots left over from decorating gingerbread houses and chocolate marshmallows for the nose. I covered orange slices with green fruit roll ups for the eyebrows.

For the invitations I used the pattern here. I printed our party information on the center paper and used bamboo skewers cut in half for the sticks.

For our first activity everyone made some dragon bones! They loved this activity. I gave each child a piece of tinfoil and sugar cookie dough that was previously divided into plastic bags. They made the bones on the tinfoil and I cooked it on the tinfoil. (I wrote each child's name on the tinfoil before baking so they wouldn't get mixed up.) I like this recipe it stays nice and moist and it doesn't have to be rolled out.

This is what Karlie's turned out to look like. I wish I had taken a picture of all of them - they were pretty cool. We had skulls and all kinds of amazing bones, we even had one egg.

For our next activity we made cascarones. I saved up egg shells for a few weeks prior and blew the out every time I cooked an egg dish. Before the party the girls and I dyed the egg shells. We made homemade confetti out of paper grass we had left over from Easter and paper left over from making the invitations.

Then I cut circles out of crete paper and we glued them over the holes with glue sticks.

After that we were going to have a hunt to find the Dragons nest of eggs but it rained that morning so we didn't hunt but everyone got an egg. This project needs started a few days before you need them so they have time to dry. Here are the steps to out of this world dragon eggs.

7" balloons blown to desired size. Strips of newspaper. A mixture of two cups water, 1cup flour and a bottle of Elmer's glue (partially used.) Dip the strips in the mixture and layer them on the balloons leaving a hole at the top to insert the treasure.

We layered ours with two layers of newspaper and one layer of colored paper and then added spots of shiny tinfoil. Then we popped the balloons and pulled them out and filled them with candy. I thought it would be cool to put a Safari brand miniature Dragon in them but candy worked for us.

It was work and took a little planning but it was a pretty inexpensive party and was an absolute hit!

HaPpY BiRtHdAy to my future DrAgOn TrAiNeR!

Things that matter MOST

It is not so much the major events as the small day-to-day decisions that map the course of our living.

Pres. Gordan B. Hinckley