Rainbow party planning ideas

 This post is just a quickie to share the links I found most useful when I was planning and preparing for Soph's rainbow party.

Rainbow biscuits  - our recommendation would be to not make equal parts of every colour, there's been some mathematical debate as to the actual proportions you need, but basically, start small and make each section bigger. We ended up making extra dough to do the final two and a half layers.  We used mostly food colouring from Aldi and some old liquid colours, but I'm told some power colours that you get in cake shops may be brighter colours with less effort.  

 Coloured pasta. I looked at a few blogs' and then sort of did my own thing.  Rubbing alcohol was suggested, but we cant get that easily in the UK, so I got a bottle of white vinegar.  Cheap and cheerful! Put a quantity of pasta in a bag, ziplock is good, but we made do without.  Add a capful of vinegar and a squirt of colour and then rub and shake around until they're all covered.  Tip out onto newspaper to dry.  We found that the ones we added more liquid to ended up sticking to the paper and not drying out properly and we threw one lot away.

 

Fruit and veg platters. I used

Veg - tomatoes, carrot, yellow peppe, mange tout, and beetroot crisps.

Fruit - strawberries, small easy peeler citrus, banana, green apples, blueberries and purple grapes

Colouring the cake  - I wanted to use as many natural colourings as possible, but I did supplement a couple of them with food colouring.   Some sites I used to get ideas are here and here and here.

I think the things I used were as follows

Beetroot juice for Red

Carrot juice and a little beetroot juice for orange

Turmeric for yellow

Spinach juice for Green

Blueberries (cooked and sieved)(and a fair amount of food colouring) for blue (still turned out grey!)

Blackberries (cooked and sieved) and beetroot juice for purple

As you can see, the colours didn't turn out exactly how I wanted them to for a strict rainbow, so I decided to mix up the layers.

Other ideas - pin the tail on the unicorn. We didn't end up having time to do this.

Decorate biscuits - We made biscuits ahead of time and used icing sugar and water and a little food colouring to make a couple of colours of icing, and a bunch of sprinkles (buy from B&M store, if you have one, cheapest place I've found for them!), marshmallows and skittles (taste the rainbow!)

Pass the parcel - the prizes were a colourful notebook and a packet of felt tip pens. I did two parcels with 12 layers each and sent them both round at the same time (I wasn't sure how many kids there would be, turned out to be 18, so some people got a second turn)

Different coloured pots of playdough for game prizes. 

Menard printed off some pictures of rainbows, rainbow dash etc and we hung them on thread from the ceiling.  And some rainbow butterflies were stuck on the windows.  And I got some multi-coloured bunting and hung that. We had paper plates with lots of colours on.



Hope that's helpful to anyone wanting to plan a rainbow party!