You might be wondering how you can make children’s parties fun when they’ve got food sensitivities?  I’ve been scouring the net and I’ve come up with a few great themed cakes which will suit almost any cake-decorating skill level (with an option at the end for how you can still achieve an “out of this world” party vibe even if your cake decorating skills are not your forte;-).
I hope you enjoy these great free-from cakes and party food ideas. The recipes and directions to make them are in the links provided.
Enjoy!
Lisa 🙂

Super hero cakes:

Spider Man by Lisa White from Alternative Chef Kitchen

Iron man by Mummy Made It

Animal inspired cakes:

Dinosaur cakes by Rebecca Mugridge from Happy Healthy Lunchboxes

There are some fantastic party ideas in this post by Bek. If you’ve got a dinosaur crazy kid check it out!!

Owl cake by Mummy Made It

Star wars inspired cakes:

Star wars Light Sabre Cake by The Nourished Psychologist

Disney  and fairy tale princess style inspired cakes:

Snow White Cake by Mummy Made It

If you want to decorate and make a cake but decorating and baking just really isn’t your thing…

• The simplest way to do it is to nail a simple free-from icing recipe (eg. this one or some of the others from this post) find a packet mix which suits your dietary needs (eg. we use this one) and then garnish the cake with other things – or keep it plain and just add candles or sparklers which is what we did for this party here).

To get some simple and elegant cake decorating tips
Check out this short interview with Rachael Guthrie winner of the USA based Cupcake Wars Kids TV show in 2015.

If you still want a fun vibe but don’t want to bake or decorate a cake then check out these ideas…

• Decorate other stuff – I’m not a natural cake decorator (which is probably evident haha;-) but I am pretty creative, so Brenton and I decided to turn our left over IKEA boxes and trampoline into the Millenium Falcon for my Star wars obsessed son.  All we needed was some spray paint, a black texta and some gaffa tape. The other little elements (like the cockpit and the satellite dish were an old lampshade and our cat’s Shakespearean collar from the vet. We covered the back of the trampoline with an old sheet (the rest of it became my costume) and we used blue gaffa tape for the light. The staircase from a cubby house became the landing for the falcon. The whole thing cost us about $15 and took us a couple of hours to make. (And it was fun!)
  

• Create some themed games – eg. For my daughters Frozen party we “froze” when the music stopped, kept the snowflakes (white and blue balloons with snowflakes drawn on them) from touching the ground and played pin the carrot on Olaf. For my son’s Star wars party we set up a Jedi training camp – by turning an old bike helmet some orange paper covered with cellophane, a tennis ball tied to a string  and a $2 light sabre from the shops into a “use the force” station. My son also came up with a  “pin the head on C3PO” game. For that we used the C3PO poster he had with some C3PO heads and blue tak.

• Dress up with your kids – If your child has a lot of sensitivities which makes themed food really really tricky, don’t underestimate how much your kids love it when you dress up with them. My daughter almost fainted with excitement when we surprised her by dressing up too for one of her birthday parties, and my son absolutely loved it when we dressed up for his Star wars party. The costumes were inexpensive and pretty easy to put together. My son wore his gi from Aikido, the boots are my husbands work socks and the “pack” on his belt was a phone holster. My daughter’s costume was an old sheet with a fancy (inexpensive) belt. My costume was an old sheet with some old belts tied together and an old top which we cut off the sleeves to for the “arm bands”. For the “staff” I used the handle from our Enjo broom. My husband wore his work pants, old work boots a shirt and a vest with a Han Solo-esque water pistol. The great thing about this is we’ve got costumes for down the track parties and when the kids want to play dress ups and to use for events like book week at school.

Of course it’s not just the cake and decorations, you’ve usually got other snacks on offer at parties too. These are some of our free-from  snacky options:

Crackers  eg. Corn chips without corn.

Dip. We’ve got a whole lot of  dip recipes in our The Alternative Kitchen book and our Hoummus Episode

Plus for some other party food ideas you could always make Jelly, Chocolate or Ice lollies check out our Kid’s Party Food Episode here.

And if you’re wondering about how to make grown up parties fun then check out our Cheesecake episode and our Chocolate Cakes episode for a couple more ideas.