My No. 2 turns 2!

2 is the magic number yesterday as my XX turned two years old! We celebrated with a birthday party at our place, inviting all of our friends in Melbourne - which comes up to about 10.

The theme of the party is 'Cars', since XX likes 'cars cars' so much. We've got a Cars ice-cream cake, Cars paper plates, Cars-stickered plastic cups, Cars birthday banner, Cars goodie bags and Cars gift wrappers for the kids' gifts. I even ironed on a 'Cars' motif on a red t-shirt for XX to wear. We also booked a Disney Cars bouncing castle but unfortunately, it was raining cats and dogs the whole day, we had to cancel it in the morning. The rain had started on Friday and continued through the night to Saturday. It didn't stop at all for the next 24 hours....urgh!

Prepartion of food for this party can be considered the biggest challenge of my culinary skills. With a lot of planning and support from Hubby and friends, I managed to cook almost all of the food to serve our guests. I must say that if I was still in Singapore, this probably would not happen. I would not have had the time, experience and confidence to cook food good enough to serve people outside of my immediate family. But over the last 6 months, I've had the opportunity to sharpen up my cooking skills, testing out a few good recipes in the process.

As early as on Wednesday, I'd started baking about 30 Rich Chocolate Cupcakes. Thursday, I baked 60 Choux Pastry shells for cream puffs and cut/marinaded 1.6kg of chicken thigh fillets for the Satays. Friday, the Chocolate Ganache for the cupcakes and Shu Cream filling for the cream puffs were prepared. I used the chocolate ganache to decorate the Lemon Star biscuits and coated the tips of fresh strawberries as well. Approximately 60 sticks of satay were also skewered. In the evening, I even had the mood to make a Triple Chocolate Cheesecake, my first time making a cheesecake.

Lemon Star Biscuits with Chocolate Ganache strips

When Saturday morning came, I decorated the cupcakes with KK, filled the cream puffs, fried the sausage and prata for the Sausage Prata Roll, made the Tomato Pesto Puffs, skewered the cucumbers/onions for the satay and prepared the stock for the Fish Head Bee Hoon. Our friend Sherin helped prepare the fish for the fish head bee hoon soup while KK helped me wash the vegetables. Hubby collected the cake, chilled the drinks and we were all set and ready for the guests by 3pm.

KK has been waiting impatiently for the party to start all morning and when his friend Byran and his sister arrived, he was literally screaming with joy. XX, as expected, was totally oblivious to all the happenings in the kitchen. He was busy and happily running around with the other kids the whole time.

The satays were grilled when the guests arrived and were a big hit. I have to thank our sponsors 'Singapore Day' (and Sherin) for giving out the cans of Yeos satay sauce...haha!

XX behaved extremely 'big-boy' during the cake cutting, standing tall and blewed the candles, cut the cake when told, though I seriously wondered if he knew what it all meant. He had two cakes, the ice-cream one from Wendys and the cheesecake that mummy made. The cheesecake's triple layers turned out well. The only problem was the Oreo base was quite hard and I struggled to dig it out of the Pyrex pan....

There's one thing that I'm sure XX learnt that day - the skill of opening presents. By the time he opened his third present, he was an expert at ripping the gift wrapper away to reach the contents.

At the end of the day, only 6 adult and 5 kids guests came and there were a lot of leftover food, which I packed for our friends to bring home. By the time KK's buddy Bryan left at 10.30pm, I begin to feel some aching on my shoulders. The sugar rush from all the sweet cakes and the hype of the day's events slowly disappeared as I wind down with Hubby over a glass of wine...... 2 a successful party and till next year.

* I would like to thank all our friends who turned up for your presence, your contributions of food, your help and your gifts to XX! More pictures in Facebook!