Birthday Craze- A tale of five balloons

For my youngest daughter  birthday party I chose her favorite book- an hebrew book called "A tale of five balloons" by Miriam Ruth.

It's a nice story, one my husband and I were also told when we were young, and I thought that using balloons as a theme would be easy.
I decided to focus mainly of the desserts table, and chose the red balloon, which end the story to limit food coloring to the minimum.
As I catered for both kids and adults I tried mixing high-end desserts with sweets I know the kids enjoy.

The real challange was the cake. I bought this baking pan from Ikea, and had a bit of a hard time figuring out the baking time required, as I had to use more batter the I usually do, but I managed.
You can see the results of my first trial in those little cups with cream on top. it was a hit! :)

After I had the cake I had to decorate it, and seeing how I hate fondant icing, I went for chocolate, except of course for the red balloon.
I decided to draw the ending secene from the book and put it on the cake:

In hindsight I should have used white chocolate

Drawing with chocolate turned out to be quite easy. you print the painting you want, put a ppc film on top and draw with melted chocolate and a thoothpick. after you let your drawing dry completely, you attach it to the cake and carefully remove the clear film et viola!

I also baked red velvet cupcakes, and tried to use as little food dye as possible:

remember the unsuccessful cake? i devoured it with a fork and added some red sparkes and ta da:

I also made my all time favorite oreo's and cream cheese pop cakes, always a success:

Baked some balloon shaped butter cookies (I didn't have a balloon shaped cookie cutter, and was to lazy to create one from foil paper, so I improvised with a knife... could have been better). the top is royal icing and the ropes are sour candies:

And my favorite, jelly candies and home made marshmallow in little jars:

Happy Bday sweetie

Feel free to ask for recipes.
Tal