Toy Story Dessert Table

After months of preparation, I finally finished the dessert table for my Mum's 50th birthday party!

Mum and I decided on a Toy Story theme which then developed to a "Nostalgia Revisited" theme, where guests were asked to come dressed as their favourite childhood toy.

I planned a dessert table with gluten free cake & cupcakes, cookies and cake pops for the event and started organising this with my friend, Danelle, who helped me heaps with the planning, baking and decorating.




I was told there was going to be approximately 150 people there and neither of us had ever catered for that many people!

Luckily my mum had organised for a lot more food to be available on top of the dessert table we were making. The whole thing took about a week to achieve, making the cake pops, cupcakes, cookies, icing, cakes and fondant decorations. Then the day came and time just flew by!

The cupcakes were a combined effect between Danelle and I. Danelle made Chocolate Gluten Free Cupcakes, then we iced them together and stuck on some fondant discs I made earlier in the week.

I made the vanilla cupcakes using a plain vanilla cupcake recipe, substituting the flour for gluten free flour which worked out fine. We iced the vanilla cupcakes with green buttercream and piped large blobs using a large round tip. We then popped on some eyeballs made out of white fondant and an edible marker for the dots on the eyes.




The Etch-a-Sketch cookies were made using a flooding technique with Royal Icing. Once the grey icing was dry I put silver lustre dust all over it to make it look shiny then stuck on two white chocolate buttons with more Royal Icing to make it look like the knobs.

Danelle made the Rex cookies by using the flooding technique.




I made the Mr Potato Head cake pops using Bakerella's instructions (who else?!) I had to change some of the things that weren't available in New Zealand but managed to make them out of fondant instead which I think worked quite well!

I also made some plain cake pops that were purple and green and called them Buzz Lightyear cake pops.



We had little labels for each thing on the table which was especially important to show what was gluten free. Danelle came up with the great idea of using mini cupcakes as a name tag holder so we stuck the cardboard to a toothpick and inserted it into a little cupcake.

I think they looked quite effective and what's even better, they are edible!




The cake didn't turn out quite like I'd hoped but hey, these things happen and at least I can learn from my mistakes!

I think the key thing is to try out recipes before you make them on the day, then you know what you're dealing with. That, and having lots of time! The cakes were gluten free, here are the recipes I used for the cake.

The end result was great, everyone was raving about the cake pops and cupcakes!

I know my mum had a fabulous time at her party and it was well worth all the effort we put in for the dessert table because people really appreciated all the detail we had put in.

I also loved that people who attended the party really made an effort to dress up. I think my favourite costume would have had to be the family who dressed up as lego, their child had a little costume too, he was the smallest lego piece, too cute!