Minecraft Birthday Party!

It's that time of year again where I go batshit crazy planning my kids' birthday parties, going completely overboard, but secretly loving every minute of it.

Minecraft birthday party - the video game brought to life.

D turned eight and he decided on a Minecraft theme since its become an obsession in this house for the last six months. After scanning the net and Pinterest (obviously) I came up with some very cool ideas.

I was really intrigued with the idea of bringing the digital to life. The kids have been staring at these pixelated characters on the iPad and/or Xbox for months so I really wanted to give them a real-life Minecraft experience - specifically the sword (diamond) and the characters.

DIAMOND SWORD
I printed a template of a diamond sword onto 11x18 paper which turned out to be perfect scale for the eight year olds. I cut two of them out (careful, they may not be symmetrical, so you need to hold up to a light, back-to-back, line them up, tape the two pieces of paper together, then cut them both out at the same time). Then I traced the outline onto foam core board and used an exacto knife to carefully cut the form out. I was able to get 5 swords out of one piece of foam board. Then I cut thin double-sided tape into a zillion squares and went to work taping all of the nooks and crannies of the sword and then carefully laid the cut-out onto the tape.

DIY diamond swords

It was a ton of work - I'm not gonna lie (the first one took me over an hour to do) but the end result was so worth it, and the kids LOVED them. I think you can order similar swords online that are made of foam, for about $20 but I just couldn't justify spending that amount per kid. These cost me pennies to make.

MINECRAFT CHARACTER HEADS
I bought different colour gift bags at the dollar store and searched the net for closeup images of the heads. I cut the bag into a square, found the middle by folding lightly in half (top to bottom and side to side), lightly marked the gridlines with a pencil where I needed to draw and/or cut, then I coloured in the squares.

These were my first two:

I left them on the breakfast table for the boys to see in the morning and they freaked out, immediately put them on and began to act out a scene where Steve was mining and the Creeper came up from behind hissing. It was AWESOME.

After the first four, I ended up making a grid template on an old piece of foam core so it was easier to measure out the faces and the placement of the features. I made sure to cut small square eye-holes when I was done.

Pig head, Creeper heads, Steve head, Hero Brine head, Enderman heads.

MINECRAFT CAKE
After scouring the net for pictures of Minecraft cakes, we finally decided on the actual cake from Minecraft itself.

My neighbour decorated it for me and did a really good job. There were some incredible pictures of beautifully done cakes, but the majority used fondant and neither of us like fondant so we used Betty Crocker french vanilla and chocolate to ice the cake that was comprised of bottom and top layers of yellow cake and a middle layer of chocolate (baked in 8x8 pans). Then I melted red chocolate wafers, spread it onto waxed paper, waited until it was almost dry, then cut squares out to lay on top. Don't wait too long for the chocolate to dry or it'll crack when you' cut out the squares.

Minecraft cake

I had also done a cake for my son's actual birthday - it was a Creeper Cake. Pretty amateurish but he loved it.

Creeper cake

ACTIVITIES AND FOOD
For the actual party, we let the kids all watch a bunch of Minecraft youtube videos. Then we let them play Minecraft with each other on one of 7 iPads we had for the occasion. We had created a basic world in Creative and so the kids all went in and built stuff together while they sat beside each other in the family room. I'm pretty sure they would have done that the whole two hours had we let them.

The food was pizza (cut in squares), watermelon and for dessert, I did mushrooms (super easy and really delicious), torches (large pretzel sticks dipped in red melted wafers and then into white melted wafers that I added a bit of yellow gel to) and cookies plus the cake.
 

Marshmallow mushrooms, pretzel torches, cookies.

After lunch, I arranged for a scavenger hunt-type game that turned into chaos, so I won't go into it here... It would have been better had we been able to go outside. Either way, they each got prizes of their choosing and they ultimately had fun for 10 minutes. 


Then we did the GHAST PINATA. I bought a Family Size box of Cheerios. I took the box, made it more square-like, covered it in white paper, then drew the face onto another piece of paper and taped it on. I then wrapped some crepe paper around to look like the leg-things, and voila.

Ghast pinata -
It was kind of hard to break, but they eventually got it

After the pinata, they all grabbed the character masks and the swords and started playing. It was so awesome to see how much fun they had with the real-life props. One guy asked if they could keep the heads and I said yes, as long as there's no fighting. And there wasn't! Everyone was happy with what they got. 

Attack of the Enderman and Creepers

That's about it. Good luck if you're attempting to host a similar party. For what it's worth, when I asked my son how much he liked the party on a scale of one to 10 he said, "ummm, about 10,000". YES.

Now on to planning ds's Super Mario Bros party in April...
Ssy