As a mom of 2 girls whose birthdays are within 5 days of each other I am fully committed to throwing only 1 birthday party for the both of them. We’ll see how long they let me get away with that! Last birthday theme was unanimous: Moana! Thankfully, it’s pretty easy to locate and create ‘luau’ styled decorations so it was really up to me how far I was willing to take it…which was pretty far! I don’t know who gets more excited about putting together a party, them or me!

I ended up watching countless hours of YouTube videos on building your own balloon towers and decorating cakes with fondant, and I’m pretty proud of the final results! I was able to keep costs down by using our condo’s party room, buying balloons online in bulk, shopping at the dollar store, baking my own cake and by making almost everything myself. I’m pretty proud of how everything turned out! That cake was quite a feat and if I hadn’t had the assistance of a dear friend who actually used to train pastry chefs I’m not sure how it would have turned out. (Thanks Christina for the fondant expertise!)

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Check out my Pinterest board and see where I got my inspiration! Moana Pool Party

The “Kakamora Cake Pops” were quite a hit! I made the cake pops by using a box cake mix and coconut oil in place of veg oil.  Once the cake baked and was crumbled, I added shredded coconut to it with the frosting. This is the inside of the cake pop. For the chocolate coating I used Wilton candy melts, and added a little coconut oil to thin it out (I find the candy melts always need a little something to make it thin enough to coat the cake pop without making it too heavy). Then I stuck on some Kakamora faces with frosting. These were a special order from Etsy (from here)- edible ink printed on wafer-like sheets of frosting!

The girls had a lot of fun creating the Moana boats with me. We made a huge batch of blue Jello. While it set in the fridge, the girls made the sails by cutting out triangles and drawing on the spiral and lacing the paper onto toothpicks. We used chocolate wafer cookies for the boats.

That cake!!! I used this recipe for the cake and I’ll never use another recipe again for a cake like this. It was sturdy enough for the layering and fondant yet remained moist and delicious!  The grass skirt was green fondant and the top layer was covered in a cake-crumb coat which looked like sand (the cake crumbs I used were the browned outside bits of the cake which I had removed).

Another favorite creation was the use of pineapples as center pieces. After coring the fruit (which was used in the fruit platter) I simply put a small mason or jam jar inside filled with water. Just as the party began I placed a variety of colorful flowers in each. The fruit vases last several days and are lovely so let my friends take them home after the party wrapped! This is something I’m sure to do again and again as pineapples are quite easy and inexpensive here in Miami.

The character cut-outs are something I highly recommend everyone try doing – as they can be very expensive to buy. I downloaded images from the internet and sent them to print at my local Kinkos for about $1 each. I simply cut them out and glued them to foam core board which I picked up at the dollar store. Out of leftover pieces of foam core I built the support for the cutout to stand up and just hot-glued everything in place. I did these about a week before the party – super cheap and super easy!

The paper flowers are gorgeous hand-made creations a friend of mine had made for a baby shower. I was lucky enough that she let me borrow them for my party and they worked out great with the theme.

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