Oh Cinco de Mayo, what a fun holiday. I remember the first time we celebrated Cinco de Mayo. We were abroad in London, and it was towards the end of our time there. The sun was peaking out from the clouds, and we were in good spirits and decided we wanted tacos. We had no clue it was even Cinco de Mayo. Now, let me just preface this by saying we did not cook a single thing up until this point. It had been a solid 4 months without cooking as the kitchens were deemed scary, and we thus avoided them at all costs (fyi we both were abroad in London at different locations, each with equally scary kitchens). What suddenly possessed us with the desire to finally cook? Who knows, but I speculate it was the taco fairy knocking on our stomachs telling us to celebrate Cinco de Mayo the one way we know how: to eat!
That is just what we did. We threw on our running shoes (first time we used those too; the gym was deemed scary too) and jogged to the closest grocery store. Yes, we jogged, we were that excited for tacos. We jogged our way to Sainsbury’s and rushed through the store looking for all the supplies we needed. We were going to make tacos and margaritas and thus needed all the typical fixings. The store had almost everything we needed for the tacos expect the key ingredient the ground beef. We had to jog/walk our way to a different store to pick it up. We were determined.
Once back at my dorm, we faced our fears and made our way into the kitchen. We had to “borrow” someone’s pans to cook the beef but we managed to cook everything and had quite the feast ahead of us. We poured ourselves some celebratory margaritas and dug in. It was definitely worth the scary kitchen and all that jogging. We feasted like kings. It was only after the fact that we realized it was Cinco de Mayo so we poured ourselves a second drink and broke out the popcorn for dessert. If only we had this cilantro lime popcorn we made last year!
Phew what a day that was! We joke about it now but we always make sure to have something to celebrate with on Cinco de Mayo, if not to remember just how crazy we are sometimes. This year we are planning on sipping on some mango margaritas and breaking into this lovely cactus piñata. Here is how you too can make this wonderfully colorful and festive DIY cactus piñata!
Materials:
- Cardboard
- Poster board
- Hot glue gun
- Mod podge
- Streamers
- A friend to lend a helping hand
Instructions:
First, draw your cactus shape onto a big piece of cardboard (we used a cardboard box) and cut it out. Then trace the shape onto another piece of cardboard and cut that out too. This will be the front and back of your pinata!
Next you should decide how deep you want your pinata to be (ours is about 3.5 inches). Cut long strips of poster board that are 1 inch longer than the desired depth of your pinata. You will be gluing these to both sides of the cardboard cactus to form the sides of the pinata. This is when an extra set of hands is helpful. Start from the bottom and work your way up one side by putting hot glue on the cardboard edges and pressing the poster board onto the glue. Hold each piece in place for a few seconds before moving on to the next piece to make sure it doesn’t pop off. We did one segment from the bottom to the armpit on one side, then rounded our way up the arm and over the top. If you want your pinata to hang, make sure you punch two holes in the poster board that is going to go over the top before you glue it down so you can put a string through it later.
Once you’re doing the part where the arms curve in in the middle of the cactus, you’ll have to wedge the poster board in there first. We found it easier to crease the poster board a bit with the crease of the cactus to make sure that once that piece was in place, it wouldn’t pop off.
After you’ve carefully glued around your whole pinata, trim any excess poster board. Now you’re ready to start putting the streamers on! Cut strips of streamers long enough to fit around your pinata starting from the bottom. Cut into each strip every inch or so to create the fringe. Then use mod podge to attach the strip all the way around. Work your way up the pinata in whatever color pattern you want, overlapping each row with the one below it by about a half inch. Once you get to the top, thread a string through the hole if you made one to hang it, and you’re done! You’ve now got yourself an awesome cactus pinata and are now part of the #addictedtopinatas club.
Happy Cinco de Mayo everyone! Comment below on what you like to do to celebrate! What other shapes of pinatas would you make?
p.s. here is my ever growing collection of homemade pinatas. We named the cactus Señor and the ram is Lucinda – they are bffffs now (we forced them to be). Go check out this ram I made on my Instagram!
