star wars birthday party - the finale

We had a successful Star Wars birthday party for our 8 year old son, Malcolm, so I thought I'd show you how it all went down. In case you missed the previous posts: here are the invites we sent out, and here are the Jedi robes I whipped up for the kids.

We started the party off with some Jedi training - which really just ended up being light saber battles more than anything. So we quickly moved on to 'pinning the light saber on Yoda.' Don't judge the artwork (it did the trick)!

The kids could have played over and over again if we had let them!

Then we moved on to the treasure hunt - Star Wars style. 

We bought some trinkets like little bouncy balls and light up toys from the dollar store and wrapped them in foil so they would look like asteroids. Then we hid them around the house and wrote up some clues of where to find them.


I found that 8 years old is just old enough for riddles and word play games, but they did need a bit of guidance along the way. It was great fun watching them search all over the house.

mini LED lights that fit on your finger

We bought blue glow sticks and wrapped the ends with foil to make them look like mini light sabers too.

The part that I had the most fun planning was the menu. 
Did you know there's even a Star Wars Cookbook available?! Too funny. Some of the menu ideas were our own, but most we picked up all over the internet. One of the best blogs I used for inspiration can be found here.

menu item cards

For drinks we served Yoda Soda (Mountain Dew because it's green) and Jedi Juice (Orange Crush). No real reason behind the Crush except that my youngest son Evan had never tried it and had to get it when we were at the grocery store.

I made some chocolate covered pretzels - or edible light sabers. The red ones turned out kind of pink but it's just as well because the girls actually outnumbered the boys at this party!! Also kinda funny.

I combined two different colours of tortilla chips to represent the dark side vs. light. Served them up with Spicy Hutt Salsa and Cheesebacca Dip of course.

Although not pictured here, there was also jello (aka carbonite) with Han Solo inside, Galactic Pizza and Bobba Fett-iccini and Darth Maul Balls.

The cake was made up with one layer of vanilla and one layer of chocolate - again to portray dark vs. light. I covered it with black fondant icing and got these really neat candles where the flame is the colour of the candle; like for example, the blue candle has a blue flame. We tried to capture them here but they don't show up very well.... 

I didn't have time to bake Wookiee Cookies so these were just store-bought oatmeal chocolate chip.

We finished off the party with a pinata mission to destroy the Death Star.

 

I tried making my own pinata with a balloon but found that it was too oval shaped. So I picked up a soccer ball pinata at the store and covered it with gray tissue paper. It worked out perfectly. Then my husband and son put on the final touches.

The Death Star was too solid to use the toy light sabers to destroy it, so in true Canadian fashion, the kids used a hockey stick instead. Once destroyed, each child received their Jedi certification. I don't have a picture of it but you can easily Google these or create your own.

In the end, all our efforts were worth it... just to see this:

a very happy birthday boy