A Walk in The Dog Park: Beverly's Birthday Hootfest!

Date of Event: 10-16-2010

So Beverly likes owls, and when I got selected to plan her birthday party, I wanted to incorporate that. I knew I'd seen some fun ideas in the past, and was excited to play along.

The first thing I made was fieldmouse truffles. Owls eat mice in the wild, so although it was a little bit morbid, I knew she'd appreciate it the cuteness, and would find it humorous.

FIELDMOUSE TRUFFLES -
1 pkg of chocolate sandwich cookies - pulverized into powder.

1 pkg softened cream cheese.

1/2 pkg of chocolate chips (semisweet)

1 pkg sliced almonds

a few round sprinkles - I would have preffered dragees, but couldn't find any of the colors I wanted, so regular sprinkles had to do.

-Mix the cookie crumbs and cream cheese together to form a thick paste.
-Take spoonfulls at a time and roll them into a ball with your hands. food gloves would probably be a good idea for this step.
-put all the balls onto a sheet pan or platter and into the fridge
-after an hour or so, put them all into a ziploc bag and back into the fridge.
-Then melt chocolate chips. I use the microwave for this. Just heat for 30 seconds at a time until the chips start getting soft, then 15 seconds at a time, stirring between each set.
Even after all of the chips are melted, you want to continue to heat & stir because it will still be too thick to really do what you want.
- drop the cookie balls into the chocolate, roll them around and lift them out with a fork, draining the excess chocolate off before setting them down. I just put them back onto a sheet pan, but if I had thought of it, I would have used a cooling rack, so the excess chocolate could have continued draining.
-while the chocolate is still wet, poke in 2 halves of an almond slice for ears, and 2 black/blue/purple sprinkles for eyes, and one pink sprinkle for a nose.

Then stick them all in the fridge to solidify.
Finished product:

Notice these also have a little bit of pink icing on them. I used pink royal icing at first - hoping I could make a nose with it, but it was just too soft, and became a big pink spot. When I decided to do sprinkle noses instead, it actually turned out looking pretty good even with the pink spot.. gave it a little more character.

Next came the "appetizer course" which consisted of an owl-shaped cheese ball (with sliced almonds for the feathers) and owl hummus (with pesto eyes and various veggie details)