No sheep were harmed in the making of this birthday party.

For Amelia's birthday we had a sheep party. 20 kids 4 and younger and their moms in the neighborhood park turned into a great party for Amelia. We are certainly blessed to be part of a community with so many young children that have become my girl's best friends. The kids made sheep out of hand prints and played "Stick the wool on the sheep." Thank you friends for blessing Amelia with lots of fun toys and clothes, and especially for coming to the party!

For the cake, I chose to make sheep cake pops. I got the idea from the Bakerella blog while researching sheep cakes. I chose one of the most difficult types of cake pops to start with, and these sheep definitely had a learning curve. The concept is fairly simple but me being without any kind of culinary education except knowing how to read blogs on the internet, it turned out to be quite an ordeal. But the end product was much enjoyed by the party guests and mighty tasty! The directions are on this Bakerella entry. I had to freeze the pops to make it easier to dip, I think I may have used too much frosting or something.

For the coating I used white non-pareil sprinkles, a candy blackberry for the face, cut up licorice for the legs and little licorice for the ears. For the noses I used Easter egg sprinkles. I almost wanted to use sheep meat instead of crumbled cake, but that would have been a little violent, let alone more expensive. Ironic too. Some of the sheep looked a little, um...slow because of their misshapen bodies or weird-facing legs. My rationale for this is that sheep aren't the smartest of animals so it's okay if they don't look perfect. As Pastor Mark Driscoll has said, "The smartest sheep is still just a sheep."