Off to a Beach Party...

What a beautiful and sunny day it is today and we're just heading out the door to our little niece's Beach Birthday Party. But no need to go empty handed so we'll take a Chocolate Rum Cake for the adults, these fun dice for the kids to play and some stale leftover bread for the birds ;)

For our honeymoon, hubby and I took the most beautiful Royal Caribbean cruise where one of our ports included Grand Cayman Island. During our tour we came across one of the island's specialities: rum cake. That day we brought back 10 cakes to share with our family and a bottle of Tortuga rum. Well, I've never been able to duplicate those cakes exactly but this recipe comes very damn close...

Rum Cake

Cake
1 cup chopped, toasted pecans or walnuts
1 yellow cake mix package (today I used a Duncan Hines chocolate cake mix)
1 instant vanilla pudding mix package (chocolate pudding mix)
4 eggs
1/2 cup cold milk
1/2 cup vegetable oil
1/2 cup dark rum

Glaze
1 stick butter
1/4 cup water
1 cup sugar
1/2 cup dark rum

Directions
Preheat oven to 325 degrees F. Grease and flour 12-cup Bundt pan. Sprinkle nuts on bottom of pan (although I didn't have any today). Combine all cake ingredients. Beat for 2 minutes on high with electric mixer. Pour into prepared pan. Bake for 1 hour. Cool in pan. Invert on serving plate. Prick top with fork.

Glaze: Melt butter in saucepan. Stir in water and sugar. (this is a lot of glaze for this size of cake so you may want to half the glaze recipe)

Drizzle glaze over top of cake. Use brush or spoon to put extra dripping back on cake. The longer this cakes sits, the better the taste.

Enjoy!

Going to parties, I always like to arm myself with a kids game, just in case the children become bored or are to shy to introduce themselves to the others. There's something to be said when both children and the adults are kept entertained- I think it just becomes a better party.

Crazy Dice

I took 2 small square boxes - that were holding sample baby formula in my cupboards and covered them in white wrapping paper. On one dice, I wrote a different activity on each side, such as:

Do the Macarena/chicken dance
Do 5 pushups
Do 10 jumping jacks
Jump as high as you can
Walk holding a ball in between your knees
Do a cartwheel

On the On the other die, I had the following:

Say the alphabet
Count how many letters are in your name
Count from 1-20 backwards
Sing the Head & Shoulders game
Spell your name backwards
Say a nursery rhyme

I tailored my dice for the children attending the party whose ages range from 3-8. Each child then rolls the dice and does the two challenges at the same time, like 5 pushups while saying a nursery rhyme. Next time I'll take empty dice and have the children write in the different activities.

Have a great Sunday!