Birthday Prezzie: Cup Cake Kit

When I was a kid, I think my parents used to give me and my siblings ten dollars to buy a birthday present for a friend whose party we would attend. At the time I always wondered, what in the world can I buy them for only 10$? Now that I'm a parent, I think 10$ per kid per party is a huge amount! (With four kids at five or six parties each per year? That's 200$ a year!)

D and I have attended birthday parties and baby showers here and there, and often I've knit something for the guest of honour. These days, with my knitting time quite restricted, I'm trying to be creative in other ways.  Sewing takes less time, but still a few hours, and there's no guarantee that it'll work out. We're attending the 4th birthday party of a sweet neighbour friend today, and here's what we've done for her gift:

It's a cup-cake kit. A friend posted a link to a one-minute chocolate cake recipe on Facebook awhile ago, which I obviously made immediately. It was really good, and the process reminded me of my Easy-Bake oven from years past. I remember loving the tiny cakes I could make almost by myself (until I got older and realized I could make a whole cake in roughly the same amount of time!). I don't know what happened to my Easy-Bake oven, and I don't know if my neighbour has one, but I do know they have a microwave. Here's how I assembled the kit; everything but the ingredients came from Dollarama:

-1 small plastic tub
-1 packet of 40 smallish ziploc bags
-1 mug with spoon
-assorted sprinkles (Bulk Barn)
-a card

First, measure the dry ingredients of the recipe into three different bowls; I measured flour into each bowl first, then sugar, then salt, then cocoa. Then I whisked each one, then sifted it to get rid of some cocoa clumps. I transferred each lot to a ziploc bag, and did the same for the sprinkles before writing out the recipe on a card.

The only remotely time-consuming parts of this are mixing the ingredients and writing out the instructions. Between that and picking up the necessary kit components, I think the whole thing came together in about an hour and a half, and cost about 6$.

I hope she likes it! Now I feel like a cup cake for breakfast.