Our Super Bowl Party

I have posted many things leading up to our little Super Bowl party. Here's how it turned out, though.

We have this alcove area that we turned into the drink corner. We had sodas on the shelf, ice and frozen drinks in the freezer, and beer and Mike's Hard Blood Orange in the fridge.

Against the far wall, we had a table for food. We had sandwiches, Buffalo Chicken Dip and Fritos, a cheeseball and crackers, cookies, and cupcakes. Everything was delicious!

How was your Super Bowl party? We had a blast.

Super Bowl Decor

We're still in the first year of being homeowners so we want to celebrate EVERYTHING at our house. My husband somehow talked me into buying this big 55” TV for our basement and you know what? I don't hate it. Well, since we have this big TV, we decided to watch the Superbowl at our own house. We invited our neighbors over, but even if it turns out to just be the 3 of us, we're still going all out.

I started our Superbowl decorating by cleaning off a wall of our basement to put a table for food. I found this great set at Party City for only $15 (½ off) that has a table cloth that looks like a football field and a flag with my husband's favorite football team on it. This table is going to be the majority of our decorating so it has to look great!

On this table we're going to have a slow cooker with Buffalo Chicken Dip in it, a football bowl with Fritos for the dip, a platter with sandwiches, cookies, cupcakes, chocolate covered strawberries, and a cheeseball and crackers. Everything will be football themed of course! On each end of the table, we made some PVC pipe uprights. It looks pretty good if I do say so myself.

For some extra decoration, we put up a football pennant banner on the bulkhead part of our basement. It's weird. It goes right down the middle of our basement. So we tried to play it up and make it look like it belonged.

And just for a little something more, I found these really cool football lanterns at Party City. I think you can also find them on Amazon. They're up in random places around our basement.

I hope this gave you some inspiration on how to decorate for your Superbowl party. I'll let you know how ours turned out!

Touchdown Cupcakes!

To be perfectly honest with you, I don't make a lot of things from scratch. There are my few tried and true recipes that I will go all out for, but cakes and cupcakes are definitely not one of those. I've tried a lot of fully homemade cakes and I've tried a lot of boxed cakes. You know what my favorite is? It's Betty Crocker's Super Moist Triple Chocolate Fudge. I think it's the best. That's my personal opinion anyway.

So clearly, the first step to making these Superbowl Cupcakes, is to make some cupcakes. Let them cool. Then, use food coloring to color your frosting. I just had store-bought frosting because unless I'm only making cupcakes, I have a lot going on and don't really have the time or energy to make mine from scratch, but feel free if that's your thing. Pipe the frosting on to look like grass.

To make the goalposts, melt some almond bark and color it yellow. Put it in a squirt bottle. I was going to try and make goalposts out of 4 pretzel sticks, but that didn't really work out as planned so I thought of something new. I took the yellow almond bark and piped some yellow goal posts on some wax paper. When they're hard, push the goal post into the cupcake. If you can find them (I got mine from Party City), then add a sugar football at the base of the goal post for a finished look.

If you can't find them, but really love the look of the football, I bet it wouldn't be too hard to make some using chocolate and almond bark. You just need to melt them, put them in squirt bottles and make them on some wax paper. Let them harden and then peel them off.

I actually had some extra batter after I made my 18 regular-sized cupcakes (because that's how many sugar footballs I had), so I made mini cupcakes. Then, I used the leftover frosting on them. And to finish them off, I put the extra goal posts on top.

They're easy. They taste great. And they're absolutely adorable.

Recipe: Cheeseball

This is my absolute favorite recipe of all time! I make it all the time and I freaking love it. I'm not going to say that mine is better than everyone else's, but I will say that I personally like mine the best. I'm a somewhat picky eater and I feel like everyone always puts weird things in their cheeseballs. I like to make mine all about the cheese! But don't get me wrong, there is so much flavor going on in this thing. I hope you like it as much as I do.

Ingredients:
8 oz pkg cream cheese, softened
8 oz grated cheddar cheese
½ Tbsp Onion Onion or onion powder
½ tsp Worcestershire sauce
¼ tsp lemon juice
Chopped pecans

I just want you all to know that I am only guessing on the amount of the onion, sauce, and lemon juice. I tend to just throw some in. It always turns out fine for me so don't be afraid to do that. Measurements do not have to be exact. Sometimes, I even like to add some Garlic Garlic in there.

Steps:
1. Work all ingredients together except the pecans.
2. Make into a ball.
3. Roll in chopped pecans.
4. Wrap in saran wrap and chill.
5. Serve with crackers.

I serve mine with crackers. You can literally serve this with ANY crackers. I know some people serve theirs with pretzels too. You can always make your cheeseball in different shapes and sizes. After all, I made mine into a football for Superbowl Sunday. I even saw somewhere that someone made theirs into a turkey for Thanksgiving. I love that idea. Be creative!

Super Bowl Cookies: Footballs and Stadiums

I love cookies. Of all things to make for a party, I love making cookies the most! I make them for baby showers, birthday parties, Christmas, etc. So surprise surprise, I made cookies for Super Bowl.

I started out with my amazing, from scratch, sugar cookies (don't worry, I'll share that recipe eventually). These are not terribly difficult to make, but you could also make them from a mix. I'm pretty sure Betty Crocker has one that's good. So anyway, after you have that done, you need to roll out your dough on a flour-covered surface. I am ashamed to admit that I didn't plan enough ahead of time. I couldn't find a football cookie cutter anywhere and I didn't have enough time to order one. Anyway, I did find a small wooden football at Hobby Lobby. So what did I do? I bought that little wooden football and I traced it with a pairing knife in the dough. See? Resourceful! (However, I must warn you that when you cut the dough with a knife and don't use a cookie cutter, sometimes the edges turn out a little cracked) Then, I made rectangles by outlining an old gift card. I like to freeze my dough for a couple minutes before I put it in the oven.

After they were done cooking, I let them cool for a while. I've used lots of different kinds of icing for my cookies, but I decided that for this, plain old store bought icing would work just fine. I got one tub of vanilla and one tub of chocolate.

To decorate the footballs, I put some icing in a squeeze bottle and outlined the footballs with chocolate icing. I then placed the bottle in the microwave and warmed it up. This makes the icing a little runny. This is a pretty quick and easy process. I filled the inside of the footballs and then spread it out a little with the tip of the squeeze bottle. Then, I let the cookies sit for a while while the icing hardened a little.

For the stadium cookies, I started by outlining the stadium sections in white. Put at least half the tub of vanilla icing in your squirt bottle. Then I warmed the vanilla icing like I did the chocolate and filled the stadiums. Then, I poured as many sprinkles as I could fit on those cookies and let them dry and harden up.

Use the squirt bottle with the vanilla icing in it to add the laces to the football. Those are now done.

The next step is to color some of the vanilla icing green. Make sure that you have enough white to make the lines on the field. Then use the remaining vanilla icing and green food coloring to make green icing. I did the same thing I did with the rest of the cookies. I outlined the section, warmed the icing, and filled them. Let them dry. Then use the remaining white icing to make lines on the 'field'. When you're done, you should have cookies that look just like a stadium and footballs.

I hope you enjoy your cookies as much as we will! I think they'll really add something to our Superbowl party.

Superbowl Decor: Goal Posts

I mostly bought everything for Superbowl Sunday this year instead of making everything like I do for most events. I just wasn't feeling it this year. It's our first year in the house and we'd just finished the biggest holiday of the entire freaking year! I mean, it takes me a full month to recover from Christmas. It's rough. So anyway, I wanted to make something big (but easy) because if I bought EVERYTHING, it was going to start getting really expensive. I saw something similar to this on Pinterest and thought I'd give it a try. Here's how to make some awesome goal posts to go at the end of your food table.

Supplies:
5 feet of 1-inch PVC piping
2 1-inch PVC elbows
1 1-inch PVC tee
rubber cement (or anything else to hold the piping, elbows, and tees together)
Sunbeam Krylon Fusion spray paint
Small planting pot or vase and filler

Instructions:
1. Cut your PVC piping into 2 1-foot sections, 2 6-inch sections, and 1 2-foot section. This should take up your entire 5 feet. I suggest cutting the 1-foot and 6-inch sections first because the length of the 2-foot section doesn't need to be exact.
2. Take all of your pieces (including the tee and elbows) and lay them out. Then glue the piping to the tee and elbows forming your goal post.

3. Spray paint one side of the goal post. Let dry. Spray paint the other side of the goal post.

4. Once your goal post is dry, place it in your small planting pot or vase and use your filler to keep it in an upright position.