“Shrektacular” Shrek Party Ideas!

We recently created a wonderful Shrek theme party for my 8-year-old.

Can't wait to decorate the Shrek cake

My children and I love planning a party!  We brainstormed our menu, games and activities, decor and party craft.

We love painting the decor and creating a craft kit or gift for the party favour. (I don’t believe in sending home a bag of sweets.)

It is much more fun to let the children create and decorate the party cake!  This has relieved me of the burden of creating the “perfect party cake” (and mine always look very wonky!)

(Don’t you agree that a large cake is wasted on little children – I’ve maintained that I might as well ice and decorate a shaped piece of polystyrene because the kids just pull off the sweets and strip the icing and leave the cake!)

We had to take our party to my Mom-In-Law’s house, so about 3 days before our party we  began our party preparations and…

• Made Masks for decor and a charade game ~click here for a pdf download ~ Shrek Party Masks



Princess Fiona



Donkey



Shrek



Fairy Godmother



Puss In Boots

And many more ….

• I created a Shrek File Folder Game.

(I will share  more about that when I’ve uploaded the game.  Included with this are character cards and charades cards. I hope to share this on File Folder Fun, so I’ll share this with you later. 😉 )

• Created lovely, edible cake decorations with marshmallow paste for a Shrek Swamp Cake.

Moulding a flower on icing sugar

Toadstools, lily pads, lilies, butterflies and dragonflies

Here’s the recipe for Marshmallow Paste:

15 White Marshmallows

100g sifted Icing Sugar

Food Colouring

Corn flour/ Icing sugar

• Melt the marshmallows in a bowl in the microwave, stirring every 10 seconds.
• Add the icing sugar to the melted marshmallows and mix till it forms a paste. (Heat again if it becomes too cool and stiff.)
• Divide into several small balls and colour each ball separately, leaving 1 ball separate for white.
• To colour – place the ball on a plate in the microwave for 20 sec and knead a few drops of food colouring into the hot paste. (Caution – it gets very hot!  Do NOT use your fingers – I used a table knife and pressed the flat side into the ball and kneaded it on a little sprinkle of icing sugar till the colour was right through.)
• When the pastes gets hard, just warm it quickly in the microwave for about 10 secs and then create your shapes.
• If the paste gets sticky use a little sprinkle of corn flour or icing sugar to reduce the stickiness.
• Different pieces will stick together if it is warm.  Add sprinkles or silver balls for detail when the paste is warm.
• Although this is completely edible, it is not that delicious. (smile)

We baked a large, flat chocolate cake.

I made Rice Crispies Marshmallow biscuits to use to build Shrek’s house.  We bought wafer biscuits for the ‘outhouse’, windows and doors.  We decorated lollipops and pasted paper sunflowers on the wrappers.  I bought a packet of chocolate discs for a stepping stone path.  We used Flaky chocolates for logs. We baked and decorated Gingerbread men with jelly tot buttons.

At the start of the party the children decorated the cake:

Chocolate cake with Rice Crispie Biscuit Shrek House

Adding Decorations

Excited ~ almost all done!

The Shrektacular Cake!

(The delicious chocolate cake recipe, the biscuit recipe and other ideas are in the pdf. download at the end of this post.)

And the party itself was a Shrektacular!

We lit the candles and sang “Happy Birthday” and then the gorgeous cake was stripped!  ~ just I had planned!

Play Pin the Donkey:

This is an old favourite, but it was a delightful success and everyone’s ‘mis-placed’ tails looked so funny!

Pin the Donkey's Tail

With some fast dance music from Shrek, we played Lily Pad Hop.  It is another easy version of musical chairs, but we used green paper plates as ‘lily pads’.

Who will sit on the last Lily Pad?

We played Fairy Godmother Freezes to music.  The child that moved after the music stopped is out and they then suggest the next movement everyone had to copy and stop when the music stopped.

Outside we played a Shrek version of tag with Dragon Escape!

While outside, each person used their bubble stuff to blow and catch bubbles.

We played our board game, played charades with the masks and played catch and Piggy in the Middle with balloons.

We giggled and enjoyed Princess’ Thimble where each child holds a straw in their mouth and pass the thimble along.

Princess' Thimble

I downloaded and printed a wide variety of Shrek colouring-in pages and everyone left with these, their bubble stuff and a mask.

I found awesome, inspiring party ideas at  kids-birthday-party-guide.com.

You can download my ideas, recipes, game instructions, activities, images and ideas here ~ Shrek Party