Planning a Disney Inspired Puppy Dog Pals Birthday? Here are some Puppy Dog Pals Birthday Party Ideas from our son’s 2nd birthday party! Pull apart bone cupcake cake, puppy pal adoption center, decorations and a BARK-B-Q B & PAW-Tato Bar!
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NOTE! THIS PARTY WAS IN SEPTEMBER OF 2019 – BEFORE COVID
I’ve always loved throwing parties but now that we have our own little boy, I get extra excited over his Birthdays and try to make them as fun as I possibly can without spending a crazy amount of money! These are the details from his 2nd birthday party which was a Disney Puppy Dog Pal theme.
Disney’s Puppy Dog Pals Birthday Party Inspiration
Puppy Dog Pals Party Decorations
Disney Inspired Puppy Dog Pal Decorations
While I do tend to grab a few themed decorations for parties from Amazon or party stores, I like to keep my cost down for parties by buying a lot of my items from the Dollar Tree.
Party things to get from the Dollar Store in party colors:
- Plates
- Napkins
- Forks
- Knives
- Spoons
- Cups
- Food Table Tablecloths
- Solid Color Balloons
- Solid Color Streamers
- Solid Color Balloon Weights
- Solid Color Pom Pom Garland
Once I pick a theme for the party that I’m throwing, I narrow down about 2-3 major colors that represent the theme. I use those base colors for all of my dollar store items like the plates, napkins etc.
I know you can get super cute themed plates from party stores but I’d rather pay $1.00 for a pack of 20 red plates than $4 for a pack of 8 puppy dog plates that are ultimately going to be covered in food and at some point just end up in the trash can.
Balloons are a cheap and easy way to scream PARTY!
The red and blue balloons are from Dollar Tree but I did grab some cute paw print balloons from Amazon to add into the mix. I love adding balloons to the party area! They’re inexpensive and really pull a party together with the theme colors.
While you can try to find a party store that will blow them up for you, I suggest buying a small helium tank. You can order helium tanks on Amazon but you can also find them cheaper at craft stores and places like Walmart. Most of the time these tanks can fill up to 50 balloons and come with the string for them. I love doing this so much more than trying to find a place to blow them up and then trying to get 50 blown up balloons safely back home the day of the party.
I did end up buying this Puppy Dog Pal Banner on Amazon for the back of the house for the party. I thought it was super cute and it cost me about $15, I think. It was a pretty huge banner too.
Of course you can order some that are personalized but I chose not to get his name on it because I normally giveaway birthday party decorations to other moms when I’m done with them.
These cute little boxes were super easy to make. I just saved boxes, wrapped them in Dollar Store wrapping paper to match the theme and then glued on some printed out photos of Bingo and Rolly from Puppy Dog Pals!
I stacked them around the yard and on the porch. They were suppose to look like building blocks haha but I just liked them because they had the puppies on them.
These blocks were an inexpensive way to add more Puppy Dog Pals Characters to the party without spending a ton of money on decorations.
Speaking of Bingo and Rolly from Puppy Dog Pals and decorating, these two little guys are Jackson’s stuffed animals and I used them to decorate the food/dessert table.
Use what you have around the house! If you’re throwing your child a birthday party, you’re probably going with a theme that you’re child really loves. If your child really loves this cartoon or theme, they probably have toys around the house that go with it.
Use those to decorate with! I used them for the food tables mainly so that so one was playing with them but its always nice to save money by using things around the house for party decorations.
I’m not sure what possessed me to buy this giant “Let’s Pawty” balloon banner in a giant pack because the colors of the balloons that came with it don’t go with the party theme haha but I loved the saying and was having trouble finding puppy dog banners to hang around the yard. It ended up being perfect to hang above the favors station.
Table Decorations
This year I kept the table decorations super simple. I bought these little ketchup and mustard picnic tables at Target when they put our their summer items in the Dollar Spot and I think I spend about $5 on each one. Not only were they great for the party since we were having BBQ but we’ve also used them for cookouts and dinners since then! So great little decorations to have if you like to cookout a lot.
Since we had BBQ at this party, we didn’t really need mustard and ketchup, so I filled them with BBQ sauce and added some little custom Puppy Dog Pal labels for “Bark-B-Que Sauce“. I might should have made the labels for all sides since we still had some people ask why we put out mustard for BBQ….
I bought a few strands of the handing garland strands from Dollar tree, fluffed them out and hung them around the gazebo and other random areas for the party.
I used orange ones like this for this 1st birthday party and while they’re cute, they are a pain in the butt to pull apart.
For this party, we used our back yard which saved us money on renting a space. I know that this isn’t an option for everyone but if you have the space, utilize it if the weather is good.
Since we were having it outside, I also used some bubbles from the Dollar Tree to make Puppy Dog Pal Bubbles for the kids to play with!
Just plain bubbles plus a little computer paper and tape magic makes party themed Puppy Dog Pal Bubbles! haha The kids went crazy over these and I wish that I had bought more!
Adopt your own Puppy Dog Station!
For each of Jackson’s parties, I try to have some kind of activity for the kids to do or take home that matched the theme. For this first birthday party, we had a pumpkin patch where the kids could pick a fake pumpkin, decorate it and take it home.
So for this party, since it was a puppy dog pal theme, we did an “Adopt a Puppy Station”.
I set up a table with stuffed puppies, adoption certificates, pens and little dog house treat boxes.
I made the Adoption Certificates using Microsoft word and one of their certificate templates and just set out a paw print jar from the Dollar tree with pens so that they could fill out their little certificates.
I bought the Mini Puppies from OrientalTrading.com as well as the dog house treat boxes.
The kids loved picking out their pup and giving it a name. Most of them loved it so much that they wanted to do it more than once! (which was fine since we had extra pups)
Not only was it a fun little activity for the kids but they got to take the pups home as their party favors too!
Dog Bone Piñata Fun
This was the first year that we had a Piñata and I wasn’t sure how the little kids would react to it. Turns out they LOVED it! haha.
At first I almost bought this cute little Dalmatian Piñata for the party and right before I clicked “add to cart” I thought to myself, “maybe I don’t want to promote the beating of a cute puppy to kids” haha so I opted for the dog bone instead. I ordered this one from Target but I have seen dog bone piñatas on Amazon too.
It didn’t come pre-filled but it was really easy to fill it with a bag of candy.
We let each kid hit the piñata about 2 or 3 times and then broke it apart because the little ones weren’t strong enough to break it haha. As soon as the candy hit the ground they went crazy!
How to Set up a Bark-B-Q Station and a Baked Potato Bar
(Bark-B-Q & Paw-tato Bar)
One of my favorite parts of any party is the food table! I love picking out the menu to match the party theme and adding details to the food table area.
I bought the dog bowls at the dollar store and cleaned them out well before adding items to them, mostly they held ice for the sour cream and slaw but we did use one for pasta salad. All of the red and blue dishware for the party came from the Dollar Tree. I told you that I like that store haha.
I made up the Menus to match the theme using PicMonkey.com and printed them out. I popped those into a Dollar Store picture frame for a instant party themed Menu!
For the Puppy Dog Pal birthday menu, we went with “Bark-B-Q” & a “Paw-tato Bar”!
Thomas made homemade BBQ and BBQ sauce for the party which was amazing! I can’t wait to share the recipe with y’all soon.
We served up some “Paw-sta Salad” ( No Mayo Ham & Cheese Pasta Salad), Paw-Tato Chips (bagged potato chips to make it easy), and the Baked “Paw-tato” bar.
Baked “Paw-tato” Bar
We mad a huge batch of baked potatoes before the party and added baked potato toppings to the food table so that everyone could make their own baked potato however they liked it.
You could get super fancy with the toppings for the baked potato bar but I chose to keep it simple.
Baked Potato Toppings:
- Butter
- Cheese
- Sour Cream
- Bacon Bits
Puppy Dog Pals Bone Cupcake Pull-apart Cake and and Dessert Table
This was the first year that I decided to go with a pull-part cupcake cake and it was great! So easy to put together and even easier to serve.
I also served up a a Chocolate Éclair dessert. It has kind of become a tradition to serve a no bake eclair at his parties and people go crazy over it.
For this puppy party, I used white icing instead of chocolate for the base and drew little doggie paw prints on it with chocolate icing to match the puppy theme.
Pull-apart Bone Cupcake Cake
This isn’t any kind of baking championship winning cake BUT it’s easy to put together and the kids loved it. That’s really all that matters in my opinion.
I used about 40 or so cupcakes to create a bone shape and them frosted the entire thing with white frosting.
If you’re looking for cupcake recipes, I have a great chocolate cupcake recipe here and a vanilla cupcake recipe here.
OR you can use boxed cake mix for them.
For decorating it, I really put my cake skills to the test (JOKING) and wrote on the cake with black edible gel and decorated the cake with a few of Jackson’s Puppy Dog Pal toys (that I washed and dried).
What I really loved about this pull apart cupcake cake was that once we were finished singing Happy Birthday to Jackson, I told everyone to enjoy and help themselves! The little ones grabbed their cupcakes and were on their way instead of me standing there and serving cake for the next 15 minutes and missing my little guys reaction to his cupcake and more party excitement.
Puppy Dog Pals Birthday Party Favors – Bone and Lighting Bolt Sugar Cookies
A few years ago I saw that my friend Terri from, Love and Confections, had a tradition of making sugar cookies for her daughter’s birthday parties as favors. I fell in love with this idea and tradition and decided to start it for Jackson’s parties!
Am I the best cookie decorator in the world? Absolutely… NOT.
Do I bake up some amazing and tasty sugar cookies? Absolutely!!
This is the Sugar Cookie Recipe and Royal Icing recipe that I use for all of my cookies.
On the show Puppy Dog Pals, Bingo has a lighting bolt on his dog collar and Rolly has a gold bone on his collar. So I decided to use those shapes for this year’s cookies.
I bought this dog bone cookie cutter and this lighting bolt cookie cutter from Amazon.
Once the cookies were baked and cooled, I filled in the bones with yellow royal icing and the lighting bolts with blue royal icing.
After letting the icing harden for 24 hours, I used a black food decorating pen to write little puppy dog themed birthday messages on the cookies.
I’ve tried quite a few different brands of decorating pens for icing and I really love the Americolor Gourmet Writer Food Decorating Pens.
Once the ink/black food coloring was dry, I packaged them up into individual treat bags and used them as favors for the party!
Gift Ideas!
This is an idea that I borrowed from from a friend and I thought it was such a nice way to give back. Jackson is a lucky little guy and has more toys than he knows what to do with.
So we suggested to guests that while presents were not needed, they were more than welcome to get him something if they wanted to OR they could bring something pet themed for us to donate to the local humane society instead of a toy. Jackson loved taking all of our donations over to the animals in need!
I absolutely loved how this party turned out!
Want more party ideas?
NOTE! THIS PARTY WAS IN SEPTEMBER OF 2019 – BEFORE COVID
If you have any ideas for more Puppy Dog Pals Birthday Party food, decorations or games let me know in the comments!
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