Inedible Favorites – Griffin’s 1st Birthday

by Erin July 8, 2015

written by Erin July 8, 2015

Come see how I celebrated my nephew’s first birthday with a star-spangled theme as it landed on July 4th weekend! Stars in all the things.

Alright cute kid lovers, I am finally sharing my Fourth of July weekend trip to LA to visit family and celebrate my nephew Griffin’s 1st birthday! This was only the second time I’ve been able to see him, the first time when he was only 4 month old. It never ceases to amaze me how much changes in 8 months. Walking, starting to try to talk, giggling, eating solid foods, etc. But anywho, being that his birthday lands on July 1 (July 2 in Eastern time as I mentioned before) we had a combo July 4th-1st birthday party!

The weekend was filled with all kinds of star shapes, including cookies, cake, watermelon, cheese slices, apples in the sangria, and of course the decorations. Just like the tool cut-out cookies I made for Luke’s 3rd birthday, we used my pertri dish cookie and royal frosting recipe to make some star and #1 shaped cut out cookies. Decorated in red, white and blue. And sprinkles of course! I let Luke decide which cookies got what type of sprinkles. I had to do the actual sprinkling however as he was more interested in eating the sprinkles and subsequently staining his fingers purple due to the mixture of colors.

We also made slow cooker BBQ baked beans, my slow cooker root beer pulled BBQ chicken, my red, white and blue sangria, and that glorious star-surprise-inside cake you see above! We used a recipe from Tablespoon but baked two 9-inch layers instead of three 6-inch and then frosted it with the chocolate frosting from my chocolate lover’s cupcakes because my sister-in-law and Luke decided that chocolate frosting was the superior option. Griffin had his own banana cake with Greek yogurt as the frosting and he loved it. As expected, it ended up all over his face but I captured these photos upon first bite and are therefore less messy.

Did I mention my brother made patriotic corn hole boards too? Oh, and we painted the front lawn with red, white, and blue stars too. We went all out!

Want to see more? Keep scrolling through to see a few other photos from the weekend. I don’t want to bombard you (and possibly your cell phone) with too many because there are tons!