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I’m say to see it go, but I’m excited to bring you the final part of the Party Planner celebrating the release of all things ninja- including the release of Ninja The Mission Force Season 2! Make sure you’ve checked out Part 1, Part 2 and Part 3.

Let’s start out again with some easy snacks — like some throwing star nachos.

Ehehehe. So this one requires very little in the way of prep or ingredients. All you need are some blue corn chips and …whatever nacho toppings you prefer. I’m of the nacho-cheese-only brigade, but you can really pile on whatever you want as long as it’s a small pile. Large piles will obscure the chip shuriken. All you need is to pick out some nicely flat and sharp cornered chips, six of ‘em, and lay them together in the middle of the plate. Hint: use some cheese to “glue” the chips to the plate to help them stay in place while you lay on the toppings.

If nachos aren’t you’re thing, or you don’t feel like preparing individual portions of anything, you can always go the family style route and prepare some yin-yang dip.

I used salsa and salsa con queso, but you could really use any two color contrasting dips you prefer. Just spoon them into the bowl in the classic shape, set it out and enjoy.

If you’re looking for a more well rounded option and an actual meal, try one of my favorite things to make around here: sushi in a bowl. I’ve found a link to explain the idea with a California Bowl, but you could do this with any sushi ingredients you prefer. The best part is that leftovers make an amazing lunch the next day.

I’ve also scared up a few more drink options for the more adventurous of you to try. The Ninja Turtle Cocktail sounds good to me, and would excellent served with pizza for a child-of-the-80′s ninja party. Or, you could get yourself a bottle of Blavod, the awesome black vodka, and make any vodka recipe you like. The Blavod will give it a black hue, you can give it a ninja name. A list of the classic recipes can be found here.

Alright, let’s wrap up with a big dessert finale shall we? Time for dessert sushi.

There are a million different ways to make something like this, and the internet is full of them. I’m just offering a few different tweaks on the general idea.

For my Nigiri sushi, I cut blocks out of a sheet of white cake that I baked and let cool. I then lay my toppings on top, making sure to cover it well. For these guys I used yellow Peeps bunnies slightly stretched out to simulate an omelette topping, dark red Fruit by the Foot to be my tuna, and strawberry Laffy Taffy rolled out to be my salmon. Then it was time for the rice. I mixed together dried flaked coconut with sweetened condensed milk, mixing it with my hands and adding more of the milk to the coconut until I had a sticky clay texture. I started with two cups of coconut, adding more as I went to get the texture right. I then patted this goopy mess along the sides of the cake blocks, pressing it in place gently and letting the stickiness hold everything in place. I left that to sit in the fridge for a bit, then finished it off. I used green Fruit by the Foot (I cut out the green section for the crazy tie-dye variety) to use as the nori seaweed holding the whole thing together.

For the maki style sushi, I used sliced green apple licorice twists, bits of strawberry and green apple Laffy Taffy, and Swedish Fish for the fillings. I cut them to the same length, then patted some more of the sticky coconut “rice” around to form a single “slice” off of a sushi roll. A little more Fruit by the Foot “nori” and they were ready to go.

These actually looked good and tasted good, but were a huge mess. So I wouldn’t recommend this one for a big crowd, or a crowd of little kids. Still, I had to try something crazy to finish off this party planner, right?

All right folks, that’s all I’ve got. Thanks so much for reading, and I hope there are many ninja themed parties in you future!

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Have you purchased the pure madness and joy that is Season 2 of Ninja The Mission Force?  Then you qualify for another ninja training session in the deadly art of entertaining.

We start off with a twist on the classic meat and cheese platter.

Yep, someone assassinated the appetizers. And yes, it is just as much fun to to as it looks. I know it’s simple, but it has a big visual impact in person. Plus it’s practical! No one is going to be searching for a knife to cut themselves off a slice. I actually wanted to use some miniature katana blades or one of the many, many sais we have sitting around, but I decided to go with the basic version instead. If you up the ante, send me a picture.

Next up, something I like to call “Bruce’s Balls.”

Meatballs (whatever your favorite home-made or store-bought variety might be) in a mix of bbq and chili sauce, topped with a dried apricot and skewered with a cocktail sword. They actually look kinda nice sitting out with the red and gold color, and they encourage your guests to have tiny sword fights. The loser is the one who gets marked with tiny blood droplets of bbq sauce.

Now both of these items have just been little nibbles. But what if you’re hoping to have a heartier ninja party? Then I recommend a hero nourishing bowl of ninja chili.

It’s the same throwing cheese stars I used on the burgers in Part 2, but I like showing ways to offer different food based on the same decorative idea.

Now, I’m not a huge drinker, but I figured a party guide needed some drink options. So here are a few cocktails I found online — let me know if they’re any good!

The Ninja Cocktail
Another Ninja Cocktail
Ginger Ninja

That’s it until tomorrow, when I wrap this up with Part 4!

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Ladies and jellybeans, time to karate chop you right in the appetite with the return of the Ninja The Mission Force Season 2 Party Planner! The DVD has been out long enough for folks to get their hands on a copy, so I’ll be banging out the rest of the planner over the next few days so you have a chance to celebrate Bruce’s return in style.

First up, the super easy it’s-all-in-the-presentation treat, ninja fruit kebabs!

Yep, that would be fresh fruit cubes threaded onto wooden chopsticks, served on a bamboo sushi platter. This combines some of my favorite things — fruit, novel dishware and things being really easy.

Next up, the crowd pleasing Ninja Burger. You can actually cut the cheese (quiet, you) with a knife and an eye for deadly weaponry, or you can use a Star-of-David or snowflake cookie cutter to get the same effect much easier. Important for serving this burger to a crowd — serve it open-faced, bun on the side, with condiments available as wanted.

We’re going to wrap up with my personal favorite — Strawberry ninjas!

These are great because …I have never met someone who didn’t like chocolate covered strawberries that I wanted to keep as a friend. Plus, I think these look cool. For ease I used Almond Bark and chocolate flavored candy coating to do these, as it melts easy and smoothly, but you could use any chocolate you prefer. Simply melt the chocolate in a double boiler on low heat (or carefully in the microwave in 30 second bursts) stirring constantly. As soon as the chocolate is melted throughout, dip clean and DRY strawberries in, then lay to dry on wax paper.

It’s super important that the strawberries be dry, as any little bit of moisture that gets into the chocolate will cause it to seize up and turn gritty. The waxed paper is also important, as I’ve had a tray of strawberries stick to a regular plate while cooling before, and it stinks to have to break the chocolate off to get them off the plate!

Let the berries cool, then melt some white chocolate and dribble a bit on the “face” of the strawberry to form the eye cut-out of your tiny fruit ninjas. Just a dab, and don’t worry about the details too much. Let that cool a bit, then draw on the ninja eyes with either a) a toothpick dipped in melted chocolate or b) long chocolate sprinkles. Easy as that.

And believe me, these ninjas will disappear.

Come back tomorrow for Part 3!

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So those who watch the blog know, we recently went to St. Louis Comic Con. I was going to do a wrap up post as soon as we got back, but was struck down the dread ed Con Flu*.  So now, let’s catch up on what happened while we were in St. Looey!

We got our booth set up at the end of Artist Alley, where Ed graced me with his best Grumpy Cat impression.

We had actually driven down with a Mr. Brad Jones of Cinema Snob fame in tow, who was only two booths down in the PR area.

Which was good, since that meant we could spend the majority of the time at the convention harassing each other’s booths. And eating funnel cake — they were selling funnel cake in the food area. Did I mention I love funnel cake? I love funnel cake.

Funnel Cake.

The funnel cake actually ended up being the highlight of the convention, thanks to a plague of spectacularly bad luck. Don’t get me wrong, we had some fun hanging out with team Jones and meeting a few fans. But man, this was one tough trip. So what happened?

Well, at first things went fine. Just the usual madness being a vendor, trying to find the loading dock and setup. Oh wait, no, this was not the usual madness because this event was in downtown St. Louis. You ever drive in downtown St. Louis? Those of you grimacing at your computer know what I’m talking about. It is pure madness, especially for out-of-towners. St. Louis is the scariest city I’ve ever driven in — which means I’m saying it’s worse than Chicago.

Anyway, we managed to get to the convention center and get unloaded after much stress, so we were on the right track. Until…the Dark Maze debit card got hacked. Yeah, that made life fun. This entire trip was Dark Maze endeavor, and on Saturday night we found out the card was being declined because someone had helped themselves to all the money! And of course, being a Saturday night the bank was closed. But oh! we thought, we’ll just call the “after hours and weekends” number on the back of the card and they’ll take care — oh, that number says it does not support this card.  Well, there’s this other numb — nope, same thing.

Turns out none of the customer service numbers on the card or on the website actually, ya know, worked. So that was stressful. All the con expenses, including hotel, were on that account so we had to do a lot of last minute scrambling while we hoped that things could get straightened out on Monday without too much debt rung up. We’ve got it sorted out now what we’re back in town, so that’s good. As for the wrong numbers? Apparently those are no longer the right numbers, but are supposed to be forwarded to the correct ones and, in the exact words of the bank employee, “there must have been a glitch.”

Reassuring. Hopefully there are no more glitches.

So that was Saturday’s fun. The convention ended on Sunday. and Sunday started off looking like this:

It was crazy cold and super snowy. Which, unsurprisingly cut down on the number of folks walking blocks from their hotels to the convention center. See, just like me, folks had assumed that March was going to keep getting warmer, not colder, and had failed to bring freakin’ parkas to wear. So, we were pretty glad to get out of there and head home.

But it wasn’t that easy.

This is the after picture, once we were finally towed back onto the road.

The highways were insane. Between St. Louis and Champaign, I counted 48 cars off the side of the road and in ditches. Not including us. Our spin off was pretty darn epic, with the nose of the car buried in snow up to the hood. Good news: we have AAA. Bad news: It was going to be a three hour wait to get to us. Good news? A guy who just finished towing someone else out offered to pull us out as he was passing by — saving us three hours on the side of the road watching it get dark. Bad news? Guy had some major plumber’s crack going on.

We did make it though, with a lot of close calls and a normally 3.5 hour drive turned into a tense 7 hour, 20 mph slippery crawl.

So yeah, a lot of bad luck on this trip. But still, we met some fans, sold some DVDs, ate some good grub and had an epic tale of winter driving. Not too bad.

And now, back to the regularly scheduled madness here at Dark Maze.

*Con Flu: the mysterious and vague illness one often catches from attending any type of large Convention, brought about by mixing large amounts of people in a confined area for three days. Symptoms include coughing, sneezing, fever, and wondering why there are always a few fans who stop showering whenever there’s a convention.

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