Birthday Party for little girls AND Paleo Vanilla Cupcake!

Ok, don't judge me, but when February rolls around and two of my children's birthdays are looming, I do all I can to either 1. avoid a party....2. suggest we do a 'family roadtrip'...or 3. suggest just having the grandparents over for cake.

My middle child Lucian and youngest child Clara have Birthdays just two days apart, and it's hard to make them both feel special without completely running myself ragged. Turning 6 and 9 they were both requesting I bake for their class at school, and both wanted sleepover parties. Oh my lordy.

For those of you that know me, you know I'm completely overscheduled:) It's my downfall but also my superpower - always having a new project in the works, a new meal plan to create, or a new recipe to try out. The thought of adding party planner to the list is sometimes enough to put me over the edge - especially in the month of February, just as i'm recovering from Christmas madness!

But still, this year my daughter and son both settled on having 2 friends each, on the same night, for pizza, dessert, movies and sleepover. So my husband and I did the 'divide and conquer' approach - he was left to entertain the boys, while I entertain the girls. 

He ended up taking the boys ice fishing in the afternoon, and then met us back home for pizza.

I decided to set up a spa for the girls. I covered the kitchen table with paper, and set up mini stations for the 3 girls. Each got their own mirror, nailpolish, headbands, face cloth and treats.

Our first activity was to decorate their mirrors - I provided them with stickers and jewels. Next we did nail art with a variety of colors and nail stickers. They were rushing so much from one thing to the next that their nails didn't last more than 5 min., but hey, they were having fun I kept telling myself:)

I had them play upstairs while I set up the lip balm activity. I melted 1 oz of cocoa butter, 1 oz of coconut oil and 1/2 oz beeswax on the stove top. Earlier in the week I was actually looking for koolaid crystals to color the lipbalms, but do you know they no longer have it?? Only koolaid jammers and liquid concentrate. The closest thing I could find was a walmart version of strawberry crystals sweetened with sugar AND stevia...I thought it would color the lipbalm and give it a nice flavor. Wrong. It was so light pink that there was no color added, and the sugar didn't melt in the lip balm so it ended up being more like a lip scrub. They didn't seem to notice, so I moved on. Each girl had a small lip balm jar to fill, and food coloring of their choice. This was my second fail - apparently food coloring doesn't mix with an oil emulsion, so the droplets just kept floating around in their jars. I think I was more upset than they were, but lesson learned!

Next it was time for face masks.
I mixed the following things in a blender:
1/2 banana
1 tsp honey
2 tbsp plain yogurt
2 tbsp oats.

Once blended, I had each girl put on their hair bands and then paint their faces with the face mask mixture using clean paint brushes. It was kind of gross and fun. They liked it! I gave them bowls of warm soapy water to wash it off after a couple minutes (they didn't last long).

We ordered pizza as a real treat, but I opted to bake my own cupcakes. For some reason I was dead set on trying my hand on creating a delicious vanilla Paleo cupcake. From my experience, the kids seems to just eat their icing and I throw out tonnes of cupcakes, regardless if they were out of a box, or from the store. But I wanted to see what I could whip up. 

For those of you that have baked Paleo, you know that the grain-free flours like almond and coconut are much denser than traditional flour.

It can be tough to create a cupcake that doesn't look and feel like a puck. They are heavy and often dense. I decided to still use some coconut flour, but in retrospect I would leave it out and go with just the almond flour. I bought almond flour instead of grinding down raw almonds like I normally do - I knew that blanched almond flour would be lighter.
The final result was DELICIOUS! Still heavier than I would have liked, but the flavor was really good. I did a traditional butter cream icing (butter, vanilla, icing sugar, salt) and decorated the cupcakes in different themes to please both the girls and boys (sneaky girls ended up eating all the worms and dirt themed cupcakes, so next time I won't assume they want pink cupcakes with candy hearts!). The kids ended up eating their cupcakes!! I was shocked. I will definitely make these again.

Here is my recipe:

Vanilla Paleo Cupcakes:
1.5 cups almond flour
0.5 cups coconut flour
3/4 cups arrowroot flour
5 eggs
3/4 - 1 cup coconut sugar (sub brown sugar)
1 tbsp vanilla
1/3 cup melted coconut oil
1 tsp salt
1 tbsp baking powder

Sift your dry ingredients into one bowl. In a separate bowl add your coconut oil, eggs, vanilla and sugar - beat until smooth. Add your dry ingredients into your wet ingredients and gently mix in without over-stirring. Transfer into muffin tins lined with cupcake liners. 

Bake at 350 for 22 min.

Let them cool completely before decorating with your favorite icing! Once the icing is applied it will prevent your cupcake from drying out, so don't leave them without icing!