It’s a beautiful day in the neighborhood and in this neighborhood we like to party. In our house we do parties in a “go big or go home” kinda way. For example, last year when our third born (Micah) turned one we threw him an Oh the Places You’ll Go party. The last present he opened was a shirt that read “Big Brother” announcing we were pregnant with our (very surprise) fourth baby. Needless to say, that party was going to be hard to top. So this year we had a two-for-one special: Micah’s second birthday and that fourth baby’s (Isaiah’s) baptism. Today I’ll share the birthday portion of that day. Coming soon – the baptism!
Anyway, our little two year old is in l.o.v.e. with Daniel Tiger. So is his mom. Thus, a Daniel Tiger inspired birthday party was born complete with cupcakes, a cute sign, and some tiger striped pretzel rods.
I had originally wanted to make a Daniel Tiger cake much like this one I found on the PBS Kids website. However, if there’s one thing I learned during my training in the food industry (and now in my party hosting years) it’s that I want to need to minimize my “day of” preparations. Rather than slaving over a cake the day of the party, I made dark chocolate cupcakes and froze them the week prior. The day before the party I let them defrost on the counter then piped on some delicious buttercream frosting. You can find both of my tried and true recipes here! To add the tiger stripes I put some melted chocolate into a baggie, snipped the end, and piped the melted chocolate across the icing in a zig-zag pattern.
To make the toppers I resized some adorable images from PBS Kids and printed them onto white cardstock. I cut out each character and used double-sided tape to attach them to a 3″ circle of coordinating cardstock. I taped a toothpick to the back of the whole mess and voila! Daniel Tiger cupcake toppers! Click here for your FREE Daniel Tiger Cupcake Toppers from Loving Mountain Life.
Adorable, no?!
These sweet cupcakes rested in front of a sign that read “Have a Grrrr-ific Birthday”, grrr-ific being one of Daniel’s favorite expressions! I whipped up the sign below using PicMonkey and had it printed for about $8 at our local office supply store. .
Last but not least were the Daniel Tiger striped pretzel rods. Lucky for me, my M-I-L cranks out chocolate covered pretzel rods like it’s her j.o.b. She volunteered some orange and black tiger striped ones for her grandson’s birthday, bless her! PBS Kids has a great tutorial found here if you’d like to DIY them.
I think our little tiger enjoyed it and I hope you do too!
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Christina says
Hi the link to the cupcake reciepe isn’t working. Could you please share the recipe again. I have a Daniel Tiger birthday coming up for my little guy and your cupcakes look amazing. Thanks!
Loving Mountain Life says
Oh no! I’m so sorry! Here is the link for the chocolate cake recipe that I always use from food.com: http://www.food.com/recipe/dark-chocolate-cake-2496 — I hope that helps! I’ll look into those tech issues. Thanks for stopping by and have a GREAT Daniel Tiger birthday! 🙂
UPDATE: I’ve fixed the links (I hope!) so that you can also find the buttercream icing recipe that I use. Happy baking!