My baby is finally turning 1. I can’t believe how fast the year has gone. I love to throw birthday parties for my children not only for them to have a good time with their friends, but for myself as well. We have friends that live all over and throwing a birthday party is a perfect time for us to get together as well.
Since I usually throw our birthday parties at our home, the kitchen flood forced us to change plans and move the party to a park. With all the chaos that has been going on, I really put my baby’s party on the back burner. I usually come up with a theme and then decorate and cook around it. Time was beginning to run out, so I thought I’d do a repeat of my son’s first birthday party – Sesame Street. We had saved some of the decorations and to distinguish the baby’s party from my sons, I thought I’d make different food and of course, a different and unique cake. Click here to see the salad bar I set up for the party. Perfect for when you don’t have a full kitchen.
I’ll show you how to DIY a Sesame Street birthday party with fun and unique ideas.
There are so many adorable invitations on Etsy. These examples were my choices for my son and daughter.
I made the Sesame Street characters to hang around the party from tissue paper and construction paper. Simply fold the tissue paper accordion style. Once you have a long strip of folded tissue paper, find the center and fasten together with tape or string. Start gently unfolding the paper into a round sphere shape. Then I brought up pictures of each character on my computer and began copying and cutting out their facial features out of the construction paper (I used a paper towel roll for Big Bird’s beak). Then I glued onto the tissue paper, attached a long string around the inside center and hung from the patio cover.
I set up 2 games. First, I turned corn hole aka bean bag toss into toss a cookie to Cookie Monster. I borrowed a corn hole set, bought 2 blue poster boards and outlined Cookie Monster’s face onto the board. I cut out the hole in the mouth for the bean bags to line up the hole on the corn hole board. For the eyes, I took an 8 1/2″ x 11″ large label sheet and drew out eyes. Then I cut out the eyes and peeled the label back just at the bottom of the eyes and attached that to the poster board. This made it so the eyes were bent forwards and gave it a 3D feel.
If you are feeling extra crafty, you can make your own cookie bean bags. I simply ran out of the time for the cookie bean bags and just used the bean bags that came with the cornhole game. BUT…I did make my own bean bags for the next game…
The second game was Oscar’s trash can toss. A few weeks before the party (and with the help of my friends) I collected 10 empty tin cans, peeled off the labels and thoroughly washed and dried them.
I made my own “trash” bean bags to throw at the 10 faux trash cans. I bought 3 sheets of green felt, sized 8 1/2″ x 11″. First, cut each sheet in half. Then I took each half and folded each one “hamburger” way again. I hot glued 3 of the open ends until you have a pocket. Finally, I filled each pocket with dried beans and hot glued the final edges together to create a sealed bean bag. I made these in less than 15 min. So easy, but looks like you went a lot of effort!
I set up an easy photo booth for the families to remember the day. I bought brick patterned paper from Hobby Lobby and taped it to my fence. I placed a small bench we have in front of the paper and finished the setting with 3 solid colored balloons, a few pots of flowers, and the Sesame Street sign we made. We didn’t need a fancy camera set up. Each family sat on the bench and we took turns taking each other’s pictures.
The Sesame street lamp post sign was the most involved decoration we made, but it still sits in my son’s room. We went to Home Depot and bought a stair baluster and finial top from the lumber section. Then we went to Hobby Lobby and bought a small wooden dowel, a wood plaque, craft balsa wood, hooks, and a small chain. I screwed the stair baluster and finial together. For the base, I took the wooden plaque and glued a square piece of balsa wood on top of the plaque. I then screwed the bottom of the baluster into the base using a double-ended screw. For the horizontal sign pole, I drilled a hole slightly larger than the size of the dowel into each side of the top of the banister. I cut a small piece of the dowel off to fit on the opposite side. This will make it look like the post was going all the way through. I filled the drilled holes with wood glue and slid the dowels inside. I used 2 coats of green spray paint on the entire post. For the actual street sign, I hand-painted the yellow letters and green background (this took a while). To finish assembling, I screwed 2 hooks into the top of the sign and 2 into the dowel. Then I cut the chain with pliers to the length I wanted the sign to hang. We topped the post with a globe light cover similar to this from Home Depot. It was a labor of love, but we were so satisfied with how it turned out.
We even added a small battery-powered light to under the globe so it can actually light up if desired.
Finally to the cakes. For my son’s party, I made cupcakes that were decorated as Sesame Street characters: Elmo, Big Bird, Cookie Monster, and Oscar. You can find candy eyes (even googly eyes for Cookie Monster) at any craft, baking store, or on Amazon. After dying the frosting red, yellow, blue, and green, I used different piping tips to make their fur. I used a leaf tip for Big Bird and Oscar and a grass tip for Elmo, and Cookie Monster. For Big Bird’s mouth, I cut a mini marshmallow with scissors about 3/4 of the way down. For the remaining mouth’s, I twisted apart Oreo’s and then cut in half again. Elmo’s nose was a red M&M and to tie the looks together, I bought color-coordinated muffin tin liners to give the illusion the cupcake was all red, yellow, etc. This post contains affiliate links. For more information, see my disclosures here.
For my daughter, I wanted to give her a different cake. I looked for inspiration online and decided on a 3 tiered cake (8″, 6″, cupcake), each tier being a different character. I also decided to make 2 of the tiers different cakes. For the bottom 8″ tier, I went with my favorite Beatty’s Chocolate Cake courtesy of the Barefoot Contessa. For the second middle 6″ tier, I made a lemon cake, filled with lemon curd and mascapone frosting. The top was a cupcake from the same chocolate cake batter as the bottom tier.
The assembly of this cake was more challenging. I took small wooden dowels and cut them to the height of each layer (like I see them do on TV 😉 ), for extra support. Then I layered the lemon and chocolate cakes. I now had 4 layers of cake and it was big. I frosted each layer accordingly like I done previously with my son’s cupcakes. This time (mostly because of time) I skipped the faces and had it be a more abstract representation of Sesame Street. I looked amazing until we took it outside at the park. That Spring day decided to be 80 degrees. The frosting started to melt and the cake slowly began to lean. I was horrified that it would fall over, so as soon as I thought most people were done eating lunch, I called everyone over to sing “Happy Birthday” and we cut the cake. In fact, I think my exact words were, “Hey everyone, the cake is melting so let’s sing ‘Happy Birthday!'” People then began asking me if it was an ice cream cake, which I had to embarrassingly tell them that no it wasn’t, it was just melting.
Needless to say, this cake was not my finest achievement. I was calling it a mom fail and Pinterest fail all-day. It may have begun to look like a mess, but it was delicious! Hat’s off to bakers and caterers out there who plan cakes for outdoor events in the heat. It was trickier than I thought.
Overall both parties were a hit and although I repeated the theme, I was able to incorporate unique ideas into each party. I hope my children look back at the pictures someday with amazement.
