In the weeks leading up to my daughter's birthday party, she was so enthusiastic about her Skylanders party that I let her take charge of the party planning. It's amazing how much simpler the party became once she took the helm. Kids are awesome like that.
If you've never played the video game Skylanders: Spyro's Adventure, you should. The Skylanders are heroes battling the evil Kaos, and they represent different elements, such as air, magic, fire, tech, and undead. My original party plans had an activity for each element, but my little Skylander only really wanted one thing: a Skylander's piñata. About a week before the party we got to work. I bought an oversized round balloon from the party store, and blew it up to a size that my daughter thought would hold a satisfactory amount of candy. Then we started in with layers of paper-mache. We followed a recipe of flour, water, and glue and a stack of free newspapers and neighbors' discarded New York Times (it turns out that the Times has excellent quality newsprint for piñatas and fewer liposuction ads with women wearing thongs). We were patient with our layers, doing two the first day and two more during the week after the earlier one had totally dried.
We thought the piñata was going to be Kaos's head, but halfway through the process we looked at this giant sphere, then looked at Wrecking Ball, who is 1) also a sphere, and 2) adorable, and decided that was the way to go. For Wrecking Ball's horns, we made cones of paper, taped them onto our paper-mache shell, and paper-mached right over the top of them. The painting took several coats of paint, so have lots on hand. It also would have been awesome if our top layer had been lighter newsprint, and not, say, giant photographs that were mostly black. I read somewhere that if you do the last layer in computer paper you're in the best shape for painting. That's probably true.
The day before the party we began making the Portal of Power cake. I baked two 8-inch rounds, and trimmed them so that they were flat on the top. Letting all of my knowledge of science leave my mind, I trimmed off the edges of the bottom cake so that it would be smaller on the bottom. Without the edges, the bottom lost its structural integrity for frosting, and *spoiler* gravity was about to become a problem. The party clock was ticking, so I pushed forward into my first foray into fondant.
I frosted the cake with a thin layer of frosting then rolled out a big circle of (store-bought) white fondant for the top of the portal. For the sides, I mixed black gel food coloring in with the white fondant, leaving it a bit unmixed to create a swirly brick pattern. I rolled out strips to wrap around the cake, and then strips to put down the sides of the portal. I used the back of a knife to push a brick pattern into the fondant, and with a black food coloring marker I added even more patten to the new "bricks." To create the symbols on the side, I crudely jabbed a sharp knife and carved out something vaguely representing the
shapes, and piped in a bit of white frosting. Worried about how the cake would do the next day, I rolled out the leftover gray fondant, cut it into circles, and made elements cupcakes with frosting symbols.
When we woke the next morning, the cake had sunk about a half inch and the sides were bowing out. I broke the news to my daughter who said, "Cool! Now it looks even more like the portal." Ah, seven-year-olds. So easy to please.
The only formal activity I ended up having for the day of the party was face painting. The brilliant Donetta Riley came by to do custom Skylanders face painting on the kids. This was her first experience with Skylanders and she did an unbelievable job. If you live anywhere in the New York City area you should totally hire her. (I've seen her Darth Maul, too. Also unbelievable.) Donetta made every kid into a Skylanders, and gave them a painted bracelet with their symbol on it. I've been to parties where all of the girls wanted to be princesses or pretty butterflies. At our party, all of the girls wanted to be Hex. This made me ridiculously happy. Among the boys we had Spyro, Eruptor, and Gill Grunt.
After they completed their Skylanders transformation, the kids took whacks at Wrecking Ball. The four-layered piñata held up well. Each kid got a good four or five hits before it broke open. Again, scientific thinking escaped us. The piñata hanging in the backyard was really just a beautifully painted oven. The chocolate inside was the perfect representation of Kaos. The toys and lollipops survived, though.
The kids started to take themselves seriously as Skylanders, and started making up their own games. They drew a big chalk Portal of Power and played what was basically a Skylanders version of freeze tag. I jumped in as Kaos, freezing the Skylanders. If I tagged them, they were frozen. The only way to be unfrozen was to have another Skylander bring them over to the Portal of Power.
Overall, it was a great success. Also be sure to check out the comments in my previous Skylanders post for some of our readers' awesome party ideas.
