Fat Cheeks in California: Babies: The Goodnight Moon Party

Tuesday, March 5, 2013

The Goodnight Moon Party

For One-year-old Sophie...
Goodnight Moon was one of the first books we introduced to her at bedtime. It works like magic. Soon, I memorized the book. I recited the contents to her when she was crying in the car and it always calmed her down/made her fall asleep. It even makes us sleepy too, with all that "chairs", "brush", "mush", "hush"...(yawn). Although she's pretty chill about car rides now, it's still a significant part of her first year. So we decided to make that her birthday theme.

I was so busy with the prep that I didn't take many photos on my phone! Here are some scrips and scraps...
I drew these pictures to paste as wall-decorations following the book.

Goodnight Moon Bunny lying in bed overlooking all the yummy food. Forgot to take a pic with the food!

Ang ku kueh and red eggs. The ang ku kueh was surprisingly the most popular dish, maybe because it's the most exotic! Anson's colleague who is a Taiwanese knows what an ang ku kueh is and said they added great significance to her birthday. At least someone appreciated the efforts behind this! The PILs and dd helped a lot in making this. It was the first time making this for all of us. I only helped Ma last time. FIL helped to mash the split green beans, steam and mash the sweet potatoes. He also helped with the dough, wrapped the green bean fillings in and moulded them. MIL was the steamer, in charge of steaming every batch. dd was the banana leaf man, cutting the leaves, oiling them and trimming them after they were done.What a factory!

I was too busy making... carrot-apple cupcakes for babies that won't rise. They are gluten-free and sugar-free. In fact I made the butter egg mixture 3 times because it kept curdling! Looked like an annoying mixture of tofu in egg. At the third attempt it still curdled so I gave up and continued baking it. I was out of butter by then anyway. I still don't know what went wrong. Everything was at room temperature. Maybe no sugar? Anyway, since there was going to be five babies that could snack on finger foods, I also made a bunch of baby-friendly snacks like boiled peas, corn, carrots, blueberries and strawberries. All organic of course.