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Hosting the ultimate girls tween party at your pad only takes a few key ingredients . . . A little planning, some fun invitations, activities to make you laugh, a cook off that your taste buds will adore, and a girly movie to top it all off. Think Mean Girls, The Princess Diaries or the Sisterhood of the Travelling Pants.
You can make your party elaborate and lavish, or simple and relaxed. A fun sleepover can be arranged at short notice, with very little planning. Or you could go all-out for a special event, such as giving your birthday party a fashion, haunted house or cooking theme. Have a High School Musical moment, and throw your own music party, complete with SingStar or even just a hairbrush and your iPod playlists! Channel Bend it like Beckham, and throw an outdoor sports party, or become an instant critic hosting a book club tea party. How civilised!
Make your party super special by devising some fun activities, costumes, decorations, props, invitations, take home goodie bag ideas, and recipes. Try to plan ahead so that you are excited and not frazzled when it comes to party time.
Your party can be themed around anything that you really love! Just think about what you and your friends enjoy doing when you get together, and take it from there. Or try something you rarely do. . . You just may discover a hidden talent for art, dancing or film reviews.
Let the party planning begin. . . And find out more in Girls Only, which is available now.
My first brush with fashion came on an overseas trip to Paris at eleven years old with my parents. I remember arriving into Charles de Gaulle airport, to realise that my fluorescent pink and blue patchwork parker, just wasn’t going to cut it in the most chic city on the planet. Then later in the Latin quarter, I noticed Parisian girls my age wearing little black dresses with black hosiery, smoking and sipping on double espressos. All with an air of ‘bored chic’ that only a Parisian can pull off with panache. Looking down at my big orange Fanta and denim cut off’s, I realised I had a long way to go.
Excited with my new found fashion obsession, I decided to lobby to my parents for a black velvet tuxedo jacket that I found in a painfully expensive boutique in the ‘Opera’ district. (Yves Saint Laurent would have been proud.) I was in a trance; all after only one day in the fashion mecca of Paris.
I never did get the jacket, but remember spreading the word to my friends back home that the ‘tendance du jour’ was the little black dress. Ironically, many moons later, it still is.
And now, through a love of design and fashion (but a complete inability to sew) I have found my niche as a fashion and beauty illustrator for such fabulous brands as Vogue, Tatler, Chanel and Neiman Marcus. And I can’t help but wonder if that fateful trip to the city of lights so many moons ago may have been the original spark to the creative path I now find myself on.
Top fashion movies for a girls night in –
• Funny Face http://www.imdb.com/title/tt0050419/
• The Devil wears Prada
• Rear Window (a la Grace Kelly)
• Roman Holiday
• Confessions of a Shopaholic http://www.shopaholicmovie.com.au/
• Breakfast at Tiffany’s
• Sabrina http://www.imdb.com/title/tt0047437/
I recently caught the wonderful film Julie and Julia at the cinema, whereby the title character works her way through Julia Child’s famous cookbook, and burns or ruins almost every dish along the way. I couldn’t help reminisce about my own cooking disasters and triumphs during the course of compiling a number of tween friendly recipes for Girls Only.
Most of the recipes in the book are my own old faithfuls, but some were uncharted territory. There were the black cat cookies that took four attempts to get right, the tarte-aux- pommes that I completely under cooked, the coconut bread that I completely over cooked and then the chocolate mouse that refused to set. (So typically French!) This was of course all in the name of gastronomic research, with only the ones I finally got right, and loved, making it into the book. Enjoy…
Apple Tart (Tarte-aux-pommes)
Ingredients
Melted butter, to grease
1 sheet (25 x 25cm) puff pastry, partially thawed
1 50g pkt almond meal
1 tbs caster sugar
1/4 tsp ground cinnamon (optional)
1 egg white, lightly whisked
1 large golden delicious apple, quartered, cored, (very thinly sliced)
85g (1/4 cup) apricot jam
To make
Preheat oven to 220°C. Brush a baking tray with melted butter. Place pastry sheet on greased tray and score a 2cm border around sheet, only scoring half-way through. Combine almond meal, sugar, cinnamon and egg white, and spread evenly over pastry. Top with an overlapping layer of apple slices. Bake in preheated oven for 20 minutes or until apples are tender and pastry is crisp.
Meanwhile, melt jam in a small saucepan over low heat. With a pastry brush, brush the melted jam evenly over apples and pastry. Cut apple tart into quarters. Cut each quarter in half diagonally and serve immediately.
As a writer and illustrator I am very used to being quietly cocooned in my lovely, creatively unorganised office. I’m either tapping away at the keyboard, or drawing into a sketch pad, take-away latte on desk, Pink Martini playing in the background… Office politics? Nada. Wet hair still in a head towel while working? Sometimes.
There are of course the occasional moments when I miss the water cooler gossip of a big office. The who is stealing from the stationary cupboard again and the who sang copacabana fuelled by too many appletinis at the Christmas party, are sadly no longer part of my work life.
But on the whole, I love working for myself. Aside from writing books for tweens, my work in fashion and beauty illustration can range from department store windows in the US, to Japanese t-shirt designs, all illustrated to my own soundtrack, and the sweet scent of a diptique candle.
Two weeks ago however I left the comfort of my work sanctuary in Melbourne en route to Sydney to catch up with the lovely team at Random House and see some book editors in the name of press for Girls Only.
Our main appointment was with Amy, the editor of Girl Power. During the catch up, I was completely inspired and captivated by Amy’s path to success at such young age, I almost forgot to plug my own book.
Safely back to the Random House offices, I was asked to film a video blog for Girls Only. I smiled and casually replied that it was no problem at all, even though I actually would prefer to run off a bridge than be filmed on camera…
Suddenly putting a freelance writer behind a camera? Priceless…
It’s finally hit the day my upcoming title for tweens Girls Only is to release, and I’m looking forward to that final bite of the cherry for any author; seeing your book on shelves in actual bookstores. (And then quietly moving each copy from the dark corner at the back of the store that they were originally positioned in, up next to Bryce Courtenay and Dan Brown at the front.) A ritual I will be reminding my mother and close friends to also kindly partake in.
It’s my third book, and a follow up to my last title for girls nine to twelve years called Girl Secrets. Girl Secrets was all about the good and the not so good times of growing up, and finding a way to feel comfortable in your own skin. Girls Only is a more glittery affair, on how to host the ultimate girls night in. Covering invitations, costumes, activities, recipes and take-home treats for the modern-mini-party-planner.
With memories of my own Zoolander style dance-off routines to John Farnham’s ‘Take the Pressure Down’, goo infested haunted house parties, movie marathons set to a Cyndi Lauper soundtrack, and make-overs with mums stayfast lipstick which we cunningly thought also doubled as a blush and eyeshadow (but true to it’s name, is impossible to remove.) I knew I was the right woman for the job…
My top tween party tips…
• Really help out your host, she will love you for it.
• Set yourselves up in a room that won’t keep the rest of your family awake, if you will all stay up gossiping until dawn. (This is almost certain.)
• Try not to load up on three kilos of sugar within five minutes of arriving at the party. Snack on some healthy nibbles too.
• Arrange all of your bedding needs, as well as drinks and snacks, before the party, so you can relax when your guests arrive.
• Regardless of your party theme, always have a DVD or two on hand. Even if you won’t catch a word of it due to all of the chatter…
Until we next blog…
The Random Blog 
