Celebrating Birthdays at School

My Norah was born "right under the wire" when it comes to being able to celebrate birthdays during the school year with her classmates.

She's finishing up kindergarten now, in fact, next week is her last week of school.  Today, she officially turns 6 years old.  The teacher does a pretty cool thing to celebrate birthdays at school.  She has all the kids sit in a circle, she made a "pretend" cake out of 3 layers of circular boxes and uses candles powered by mini-batteries as the candles.  She hands the birthday girl a globe, the teacher pulls out the piece of paper that Jon and I wrote down at the beginning of the school year which tells all about the special things Norah did for each year of her life so far and shares it with the class.  Norah has to walk around the cake completely after each year of her life.  She then got to choose which birthday song she want the class to sing to her.  The teacher then asked Norah what she wished for and she responded with - "more Junie B. Jones books" to read.  Although she told me in the car later that she really wanted a pony but I was sitting there and she knew I couldn't afford a pony!

A fellow blogger and friend, Robyn blogged about a cool birthday cupcake idea that she used for her daughter's birthday.  Being so impressed by these unicorn cupcakes, I had to make Norah cupcakes made to resemble horses.  So I filed her pictures away and told Norah that if she wanted me to make such cupcakes for her for her birthday when it came around I would.

Norah never forgets a thing.  She has a mind like a steel trap!  So I knew I needed to make these cupcakes for her class.  Friday seemed like a reasonable day to bring them in since this coming week is her last week of school and a very busy fun filled schedule of events.

I made the cupcakes earlier in the day on Thursday and my friend Maryjo came over after the kids went to bed and helped me decorate 40 cupcakes!  I must say they turned out awesome!  I had to improvise from the way my friend Robyn made her cupcakes because I couldn't find white circus peanut candies, the store only had them in orange.  But I do like the way they turned out without the peanuts.  The kids loved them, the teacher thought it was clever!  So all around a good choice!

They were made totally from love - to Norah - from Me!

For those of you who were interested in how to make them they were simple but time consuming.  The neck and head are made from the icing layered wafer cookies.  I cut them in a diagonal to a get the neck portion and the remaining piece was the head portion and it was glued together by icing.  The eyes were made of raisins cut in half and the ears were chocolate chips.  The main was chocolate icing and the tail was chocolate Twizzlers!  I actually had to take to cookies and ice them together with icing because the ones I purchased were too "skinny".  Next time I would use the chocolate covered wafer cookies made by Keebler only because the humidity caused the wafer cookies were I did not ice together with my own homemade icing to separate.