A woodland inspired party - those toadstools

So this is pretty much where it all began to get a little more than just paper plates and party rings (not that there's anything wrong with either!)...Tabatha's 2nd birthday and my first real attempt at multi-tiered and fondant iced cakes.  I don't really know what possessed me to start with a shaped cake, but it seemed like a good idea at the time...more on the b*****d cake later.

I bought a "grass" table runner online, which has actually proved quite useful in subsequent parties, and used this and a giant slab of tree trunk (borrowed from my best friend) to set the scene.

I thought (please note the past tense!) that it would be a lovely idea to get crafty with my daughter and make some papier mâché toadstools and I roped in mum to help too.  Anyone with young kids knows their attention span tends to be shorter than a goldfish, so you inevitably end up finishing said crafty project in the wee hours of the morning once the crap arty bits and bobs have been tidied away.  When it comes to papier mâché, this generally means the best part of an hour scraping the crusted concrete from the table, floors, walls, doors, any washing drying in the immediate vicinity  and any surface of the house below about 1m...I think in future we'll save the joy of papier mâché for Nanna's house.

Luckily mum and dad have a smidge more creative ability than I do, otherwise I'm sure I'd still be attempting to build papier mâché toadstool bases around varying sizes of plastic bottles; seemed like a genius idea at the time...in hindsight, a bit bloody stupid.  I'm pretty sure I also got the ratio of flour to water wrong somewhere along the line as the next morning the whole house smelt like a men's sweaty changing room.  No amount of paint was covering it, and in fact the sodding mixture was so ropey, it kept cracking and then releasing even more of the putrid stench, it was almost as if the paint was aggravating it further.  I went with them anyway, the party guests would have to lump the smell and probably assume that my children were extremely grubby.  I was happy to take the risk rather than spend another week of my life remaking the toadstools.

So here they are, in all their glory.  Toadstool tops made using upturned bowls of varying sizes and bases are a combination of kitchen rolls, loo rolls, wooden dowels my dad had in the garage and some sort of cardboard tube my dad had, again in the garage (I presume kept for a moment such as this!)

Party tip no 1: It really doesn't matter if it looks crap, you can always tell people the kids helped