It's almost party time.

Jericho feels like being shirtless most of this summer, hey that's an improvement over last summer...when he wanted to be totally nekkid LOL. He is so funny to watch play with his toys, he is much more into playing pretend by himself than his siblings ever were, and the story lines and how he plays is often quite entertaining. I love hearing all the smashing of the bad guys and rescuing superheroes. He had quite the set up going in our living room today.

Is he not the cutest munchkin ever?!

Love this kids smiles.

With only a couple days left until the party, Jason and I got a start on some of the food today...we are really trying to not be up until 2am the night before this year. We will have to see if it works or not. We made the starfish sugar cookies today, Jason grabbed my camera and took this picture while saying how this never happens so he better capture the moment...whatever, LOL.

After my Halloween finger cookies didn't hold their shape I was scared we would end up with giant orange blobs. I went in search of a recipe that would hold shape during baking for these star shaped cookies. I'm pleased to announce they turned out great!
Going in the oven

All done and cooling...still shaped like stars!
Jason had the brilliant idea to use food coloring to make them orange instead of messing with orange frosting...they store so much better and are so much faster to make if you don't have to frost them, awesome idea...so very glad he thought of it.

The recipe was super easy...and DIDN'T require chilling...major time saver. One of the main things to NOT add to cookie dough if you don't want it to spread is baking powder.

You need:
1 cup of butter, room temp
1 cup of granulated white sugar...we put a little extra, less than 1/4 cup, but it helps
1 tsp vanilla extract
1/2 tsp of almond extract
1 egg
3 cups of all purpose flour
Parchment/wax paper
Powder sugar (we sprinkle some on the wax paper and roller pin...keeps it from sticking and adds a touch of sweetness too)

 Directions:
Preheat over to 350.

Cream together butter and sugar in a mixer...don't over mix.
Beat in egg and extracts. We added the food coloring here as well.

Add flour a little at a time. It will get pretty stiff, if you need to you can put it on the counter on the parchment paper, wet your hands and finish combining it by hand.

Divide the dough into workable sections if need be and roll it out with a rolling pin between two pieces of parchment paper. You want the cookies to be about 1/4" thick. Cut out your shapes and carefully move them to cookie sheets lined with parchment paper.

Bake 6-8 minutes. Let cool on the sheet until they are firm enough to transfer to a cooling rack.

Depending on your cookie size this should make about 3 dozen cookies. Obviously our stars were big so we had to quadruple this recipe. The cookies could be a touch sweeter, but since they turned out yummy enough and stayed in shape we didn't mess with adding a smidge more sugar. Next time we may.

Getting some of the decorations ready.

Next we got started on the treasure chest cake...unfortunately our first attempt ended in total disaster, thankfully we have time to try again.

It started off so good, a little frosting between the bottom two layers.

The faux fondant frosting went on perfectly.

The bottom of the chest and top both looked fabulous.

Jason made a wedge out of rice krispy treats to hold the lid of the chest open a little.

It looked great, and like it was going to work well.

Then we tried to put the lid on...and that is where it all went wrong :( The lid part broke in half and crashed on the the bottom part. The cakes were ruined...so in the trash they went. Jason is going to makeshift a platform and little posts to hold the lids weight and we will try again tomorrow. Fingers crossed that it works, we won't really have time for a 3rd try at it.