Webkinz party recipes

I recently hosted a Webkinz Jr. Pet Party, and the hostess kit I received included some recipe cards for fun kiddie snacks. I probably would have ignored the cards and bought some popcorn and juice for the occasion, but The Pea spotted the cards and pounced on them.

How cuuute! We haaaaaaave to do these, mama!

Oh, the power of a cute cartoon bear and catchy name. Maybe I should print out a recipe for eggplant curry and put Webkinz characters on the card so my character-obsessed kids will be more eager to try out new foods. Anyway, the recipes looked simple enough, so I decided to use them for the party.

These Kinz Kabobs are basically fruit skewers; they suggest melon balls and grapes but you can use any sliced fruit in season. You can't really go wrong with kids, fruit and parties, but to make it extra special you need a killer presentation, and I think I slayed it with this one.

I used up extra-fancy skewers with streamer-thingies on the end, so even before I set the thing up all the kids were clamoring for a piece. I stuck the finished skewers on a hollowed-out melon half so the dish looked like a porcupine on steroids, or a Fourth of July diorama. I also filled in the bare spots on my melon pincushion with single pieces of fruit stuck on smaller toothpicks. I wish I could have taken a better photo, but I literally had about five seconds before the kids swarmed on the fruit kabobs and picked it clean.

I used club soda instead of ginger ale for this kiddie punch because I wasn't sure that all the kids would like the taste of ginger ale. In fact, I wasn't even sure they would like the taste of cherry juice. I was almost tempted to substitute the cherry juice for a more generic fruit punch, but I couldn't find frozen fruit punch that was 100% juice.

The pineapples sweetened up the cherry juice without taking away too much of their tartness, and the soda water gave it a pleasant zing, and I was pleasantly surprised to find the pitcher empty at the end of the party.

I passed on the Worms & Dirt Dessert and Sweet Pet Parfaits, but since the other two dishes had lots of healthy fruit in them, I couldn't resist treating the kids to some Yummy Pet Snacks:

I omitted the peanuts but I made up for it by using dark chocolate chips and extra humongous golden raisins that we got from our local farmer's market. I'm pretty sure I "messed" this recipe up, because step 3 says that the mixture is supposed to cool before stirring in the raisins and chocolate chips, and I stirred them in right away -- which, of course, meant that the chocolate chips melted into a gigantic gooey mess and coated the chex/pretzel mixture. And in typical "me" fashion, I decided to be generous with the chips -- instead of 1 cup, I threw in the whole bag, which is more like 2 cups. So I had to throw in a whole lot more pretzels, because why let all that good chocolate drip down onto the parchment paper, right?

Failure, shmailure. The end result was not the pretty-looking trail mix I had envisioned; rather, we ended up with a chocolate covered mess that everyone, human and animal, loved. I'm sure they look more like pet snacks than any trail mix would, and they were amazing.


Check out my Webkinz Jr. party post with all the highlights and photos on Bonggamom Finds! You can even enter to win a Webkinz Jr. goody bag (and commenting on this recipe post gets you one extra entry!).