Friday, January 26, 2018

Chopped Jr Birthday Bash

Yum
Last weekend we threw my daughter a birthday party at the house. I tried to offer numerous other options and even attempted bribing her, but she wouldn't budge. She wanted a Chopped Birthday Party. I wondered about the state of my sanity while pulling it together and was really nervous at the thought of having 9 little girls over to my house for a Chopped competition, but to my surprise it went way better than I could have ever expected! The girls had an absolute blast and seeing them so excited made it all worth it!
I ordered the Invites, score sheets, banner and all of the cute printables here from Etsy
I also ordered kids plain aprons and some fabric markers so as the girls were arriving they could each decorate an apron to use while cooking. I was thinking instead of the usual bag of annoying noisemakers/stickers/candy that dyes their mouth green and gets left on the floor of your car after a party this was at least something they could keep and use at home too!
 We had the girls pick a number and then divided them into 3 teams of 3. I set up 3 small stations that they could cook and prep at and had a "pantry" table of extra ingredients they could use as well
The Pantry Table before it was raided is below
Afterwards it looked like a swarm of locusts had cleaned it out
For the entree round the secret ingredients were tomatoes, pizza dough and cheese (I had 5 types of cheese and they could pick the one they wanted)
I pre-cooked bacon and Italian sausage to give them some proteins to choose that didn't need to go on the stove and made sure I had a ton of veggies to choose from too.
For the most part I was really impressed with the final dishes. A few of the girls were worried and told me before we even started that they had never cooked anything before so my expectations weren't very high to begin with. 
Just in case you're wondering, yes that is a pizza surrounded by cool whip in the bottom shot. 
Yeah, it was rough...
They were so excited for the reveals! 
There was a lot of squealing...it was LOUD y'all
Team 1 hard at work
 So stinking cute!
 I loved seeing how intense they were as the clock was running and had a great time teaching them a little bit of knife skills for those that were interested
Hands Up! Round 1 is over!
 For the dessert round, I had a whole dessert bar in the middle of the table so that served as decoration and their stash to work with plus the pantry table for them to pick from. For their secret ingredients they had to use any flavor cupcake, sprinkles and their choice of icing.
There were sprinkles EVERYWHERE
Overall, it was a blast and I hope the kids had as much fun as Brianna did!

4 comments:

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  3. That is so cute - I love this idea Lauren! I remember seeing this I think on Facebook and something told me to stop by here because you would have a recap.

    My twin sister and I did something similar but we were HIRED to put it together for a Mom who didn't cook at all, but her daughter was dead set on a Chopped party too. We walked into this woman's kitchen it was legit like a $100,000 kitchen and she said "I use the tea kettle to make tea!" Gah. And she paid us each $200 - crazy!

    ReplyDelete
    Replies
    1. Thanks so much Biz!! I wish I could get hired to do this again! Go figure on the lady wiht a nice kitchen that never uses it- too bad you can't go there to break the kitchen in sometimes!

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