Kids will love a pirate themed party.
From lost treasure and pirate ships to cannonballs and treasure islands, a pirate birthday party promises children lots of swashbuckling fun and excitement. Set the scene for an adventure on the high seas with everything from eye-patches and treasure maps to pirate flags and messages in bottles, and complete the party with old-fashioned pirate grub inspired by what the pirates of old used to eat. Does this Spark an idea?
Hard Tack
Replace the traditional birthday cake with "hardtack" (otherwise known as Sea Biscuits). Hardtack was a bread product that lived up to it name, being hard as a rock and just as appetizing. It was frequently infested with weevils (small maggots).
You can make your "hardtack" out of ordinary white cake batter and a touch of tan food coloring. Pour the batter only a third of the way up in the cupcake pan and then cook by the directions on the box. When the cakes cool, you can add gummy candy worms on top of the cakes to represent the weevils. Serve a rum-flavored frosting in a dish next to the cake so the worms remain visible. That way the cake looks a bit more like hardtack than it would with the frosting on it.
Bumboo
If you want to have a thirst-quenching beverage for your "pirates," you can't do better than to make bumboo. Bumboo was a popular pirate alcoholic beverage made of rum, water, sugar and nutmeg. Since you probably don't want to serve real rum to the kids, you can instead pour 1 oz. of sugar-free butter rum syrup and soda water into a 16 oz. glass that's filled with ice. Add nutmeg to taste.
One way to make the drink even more pirate-like is to use black food coloring to paint skull faces onto marshmallows. These could then be stuck onto drinking straws.
Pirate Scurvy Cure
Pirates (and all sea-goers for that matter) had to concern themselves with the effects of scurvy, an illness brought on by the lack of vitamin C in their diet. Among the things they ate to solve this problem were sauerkraut, oranges and limes. Since the kids are not likely to enjoy saucerkraut, consider creating a fruit salad using oranges and lime juice mixed with the leftover rum-flavored syrup. Pirate flags placed in the salad on toothpicks will turn it into a "dessert" island.
Tags: food coloring