The Dinosaur Party!

We had the girls' 5th birthday party in June this year since we knew we would be away on vacation in July. This may become a new tradition, as the weather was cooler and there were less annoying flies. The girls told me last year the DAY AFTER the frozen party that they wanted a dinosaur party next, and never wavered! It was super fun to bake for.

Oh man, did I love these dino skeleton cookies! And they were so much easier to make than you think!

The cookie cutters came as a set, with a cutter and a stamp. First you bake the cookies, then you stamp the bones into them while they are still warm!

Then you fill in the impression with royal icing in the middle of the night after the girls go to sleep and you have a minute to work on cookies.

The full skeleton cookies were huge so I decided to use just the skulls to make some smaller cookies.

Look at these awesome dinosaur sprinkles!

Rosie chose chocolate cupcakes with strawberry frosting, but it had to be PURPLE.

I had intended to make these chocolate on chocolate cupcakes look like volcanoes. They did have a magma chamber surprise in the center filled with vanilla flavored reddish orange frosting, but I never did get to pipe a lava flow down the top!

Amaya's choice was vanilla on vanilla, and we found these neat dino picks for the tops.

We got this crazy pinata from a local shop. It was huge!

Rusty and Vinny both dressed as triceratops!

As usual I don't have a ton of party photos since I am always running around like crazy, but the big hit was the dinosaur dig in the sandbox! We buried plastic dinos and these cool eggs that had a tiny dinosaur inside. The kids got to decorate their own buckets and then fill them with their finds.

It was quite a success! Can't believe the girls are 5!!