Jack's Pirate Party

Our youngest son, Jack, was five last month. He wanted to celebrate with the boys from his class by having a pirate party.

I sent out these pirate masks as invites for the 15 boys. I bought the masks in a pound shop (8 for £1) and wrote the details on the back and it meant the children had something to wear to the party if they didn't already have a pirate costume.


We played loads of games including the treasure hunt. I was not convinced that 4 and 5 year old boys would have the patience to participate in a detailed treasure hunt, so instead I drew a picture of the room we were in and cut up the map into 20 pieces that I hid around the room. The children played a game to find all the pieces and as they did our older children put together the puzzle to reveal where the treasure was.

Here is Jack with his Chocolate Pirate Cake. I made it with two chocolate loaf tin cakes which I glued together with chocolate butter icing. I then carved out the shape of a boat and used the left over cake to build up the top deck at the front and back of the boat. 

I covered the entire cake with more chocolate butter icing and then rolled out a huge sheet of chocolate brown roll-out icing (you can buy from any good cake decorating shop) and laid it over the cake. Slowly I pinched in the front and back of the ship and moulded the icing to look like a ship. I used the same chocolate roll-out icing to make the deck rails and the port holes.

  

Then I laid the whole ship on a plate covered with blue butter icing. Where my edges on the bottom of the cake are not so clean I simply covered up with waves of the blue icing! Finally the sails are made from paper and cooking rods, with a little plastic figure to set the cake off!


I tried to make these cupcakes into mini sailing ships. I used cake-pop sticks and drew this simple scull and cross bones on some black paper to make the sails.

This is the the boys enjoying their 'grog' (Ribena in J20 bottles that I recycle for every party!)

These are marshmallows that I dipped in Candy Melts (Hobbycraft for £2.99 a bag) and drew on pirate details with a black icing pen. They went down a treat!