Relaxed Parents

Right then.

3) Food

[Caveat! Supermum did most of the thinking and cooking. I just fetched and carried and shouted encouragement. The following is all with the brilliance of hindsight.]

Our key text is inevitably Nigella (Lawson, 1999, pp500-505).

The slightly grandiloquently titled How To Eat was a present from friends nearly nine years ago (or was that our other modern kitchen staple, the Nigel Slater?) and has been a mainstay ever since.

Nigella reminds us that young children don’t do restraint or minimalism, that they actually like cocktail sausages and think that bits of pineapple on sticks are the height of chic. Provided they’ve been dipped in pink icing (no, we didn’t do this). By extension, our four year old doesn’t eat organic food – we feed it to him – and a birthday party is the one occasion where our customary antipathy to e-additives has to take a holiday.

So. To the menu. What one has to remember is that if you’re doing an afternoon party, food will be the last phase, so for many children, it’s going to be their tea. This means that nutrition shouldn’t be entirely off the menu. On the other hand, neither should sugar, additives and strong colours and blunt-instrument flavours (in the UK, crisps are practically a NASA foodpack – chicken korma flavour, anyone?).

For basic carbs, supermum tried out Nigella’s Marmite sandwich recipe -you take the marmite and butter and combine them, thereby reducing the workload of making twenty rounds of sandwiches or more by two thirds. Genius. We used a standard white sandwich loaf that wouldn’t ordinarily darken our door – but remember the mantra – it’s not your party!

I tracked down some of those string bags of little round red cheeses. I suspect they’re more played with than eaten but it’s (theoretically) protein and kids love fiddly packaging. I also did a late night trawl of Sainsburys and came up with bags of frozen cocktail sausages and party sausage rolls. Four year-old boys in particular will grab handfuls of cocktail sausages. I have no idea why. About sixty sausages and fifty sausage rolls left us with a reasonable but not excessive number of left-overs.

Supermum also baked the cake. The original plan for an elaborate treasure chest was ditched in favour of a big chocolate sponge covered with chocolate icing. That was a good call on her part – after two hours of hard partying, ‘cake’ and ‘chocolate’ will be all the high concept you need. You have to keep reminding yourself – it’s for the children, not the parents. (I accompanied dudelet to one small child’s party which had an astonishing layout of strawberries and cream, champagne and all manner of other nice food. Numbers of parents spent the next two hours trying to hold their children away from the display. Dudelet was very good about leaving this pristine environment alone – I thought. Then I caught him trying to smuggle out the stopper from a presumably priceless crystal decanter. Hope they didn’t count their silverware.)

Supermum also made luridly decorated fairy cakes – easy (with practice) to mass-produce and we made sure that we had plenty of party-sized bags of crisps handy. Drinks? Fruit juice. Fizzy drinks is one thing we won’t compromise on. We also had plenty of seedless grapes – a good finger food for kids and adults.

Totals for 20 children, then, mostly 4 year olds:

• Marmite sandwiches (20 rounds – the grown-ups will hoover up the spares)
• 60 cocktail sausages, purchased frozen and baked in the oven
• 50 party sausage rolls, ditto
• twenty four of those little red cheeses where you peel the skin off
• One large bag of Twiglets
• Two large bags of Hula Hoops
• 24 fairy cakes (iced, homemade)
• One large chocolate sponge, (chocolate and Smarties topping, homemade)
• Grapes (red and white, seedless)
• Fruit juice (four cartons, apple and orange)
• three two litre bottle of water x 2

You could probably get away with less but the grown-ups will snack too!

4) Execution!

“Ninety-nine percent of strategy is execution.” – Peter Drucker.

And it all went off like clockwork! Two floods-of-tears incidents on the bouncy castle, some dubious practices during the ‘Pin the flag on the pirate map’ variant on ‘Pin the tail on the donkey’ that supermum invented but nothing to write home about. During the supervised bouncy castle session, I looked after dudelette and watched dudelet throw himself around madly and happily in a crowd of other children whilst supermum and some other friends set up the food upstairs. Then they had games whilst (of course) a crowd of adoring mums clustered around supermum feeding Ivy with a collective thought bubble of “Don’t bogart the baby!” hovering above their heads. Food was devoured (it’s amazing how nicely four-year olds will eat when sat down in a group), cake and party bags dished out and finally, all we were left with was a minimal amount of packing up and dudelet gloating over an immense pile of presents.

I wonder how well this will all work next year?

P.S. Supermum insists that there were only fifteen children to which I can only say 1) I’m a writer, not a journalist and 2) we certainly catered for twenty. That explains all the cheese that was left over.