Monkey Party Madness!

Okay, so I went overboard on the monkey theme. Blame Martha and her daggone cute monkey cake. Once I decided to do that, it just spiraled out of control from there.

First, I have to give credit where credit is due. The majority of my inspiration stemmed from these two sites:

• MarthaStewart.com was the source of the monkey cake recipe, a monkey party theme, and message boards, which led me to:
• Buzzville – I stumbled across the blog where this fantatic super-mom chronicled her monkey party. I thought it was awesome, so I copied liberally.

So, first thing I did was make monkey invites. I used the template from Buzzville, but slightly modified it so I could use my Creative Memories cutting tools. It wasn’t too hard, and thanks to my total overstock of cardstock, I was able to use supplies already on hand:

The Menu
I again, I pretty much copied the Buzzville Monkey Menu, because it all sounded delish and seemed to incorporate monkey elements. I made just about everything ahead of time and just heated up the warm stuff in the oven the day of the party.

• Monkey Cake – a yummy banana flavored cake with buttercream frosting.
• Banana Black Bean Empanadas – kinda a unique flavor, but not too bad
• Mango, Corn, Jicama Salad – this makes a ton! if you can’t find jicama, you can substitute cucumber
• Chicken Cilantro Bites – these were yummy too — they went fast!
• Carne Asada Salad – i just made this using romaine lettuce, red & green peppers, grape tomatos and toasted almonds. I forgot to add avacados & feta. Drat! I included strips of carne asada meat on the side. I got super thin sliced meat from Wegmans and used a Carne Asada Recipe from a friend that we fudged (parsley, garlic, oil, vinegar and oops, forgot the salt). I accompanied with this yummy Cilantro Dressing.
• Banana Cookies – these were just regular ole sugar cookies that used a moon cookie cutter and piped to look like bananas.
• Lemonade — this is a delish recipe I found online. Mike loves it and it was easy to make a day ahead.
• Monkey Chow – Trail Mix from Costco with some banana chips thrown in.

Favors

I made little favor bags from various odds and ends. I got a few monkey knick knacks from Oriental Trading Co. and threw in some other random items:

Decorations

The decorations were simple — I got a bunch of latex balloons and one mylar monkey balloon (from OTC), then got a mini helium tank from Walmart so I could fill them at home. I also got a little blow up monkey from OTC and hung string from our windows and dangled some of the Monkeys in a Barrel from them.
Activities

We didn’t really plan activities, our party kids consisted of the birthday boy (age 1), his big sis (2.5), and 2 friends, also ~ 2years. I had one table set up for coloring and printed off some Curious George sheets, but they mostly just chased each other around.

That was it! We had a great time … now I’ve got to get cracking and plan something equally fun for big sis’ birthday in the fall… hmm..