The other week I was preparing for a Fondue Party that I hosted at my cabin for a ladies group. I will share how all of that started in a future blog but today I want to share my party with you.
I had never made fondue before, but I DID have a fondue pot. It was a Christmas gift that I had asked for a couple of years ago. It was great to finally have a reason to pull it out of storage.
One of the ladies in the group made a chocolate fondue. YUMMMMM!
The whole cabin smelled of chocolate as this simmered. Oh - what a wonderful smell.
I made the cheese fondue.
I think it is funny that it looks like a face. If I had noticed earlier, I would have fixed that face to look a little happier. Oh well. It tasted good.
The ladies each brought something to dip in the fondues. This is the chocolate table.
And this is the cheese table.
Since I had never been to a Fondue Party, let alone hosted one - or even HAD Fondue, I decided to do a little research on Fondue Parties. I started with this great PDF by Martha Stewart. In it she gives tips on the proper etiquette, things that are good with Fondue and some recipes.
I found the recipe for the Cheese Fondue online. I chose the top one in the Google search. It seemed to be the easiest for me to gather ingredients for. Of course, had I prepared a bit further ahead (I knew about this for 3 weeks), I may have done more research (or maybe not). The recipe can be found here.
One of the things I want to include in the Ladies Group is an activity. Since Fondue, I felt, was an activity all by itself, I needed to create something simple. I found a blog where someone played a game. Anyone who dropped their food into the pot had to answer a question. LOVED it.
I proceeded to find questions (more googling). I wanted questions that helped us get to know each other without making anyone feel embarrassed or uncomfortable. I actually avoid parties where there may be games that make one (mainly me) look foolish or stupid so I decided I can't be alone with this feeling.
I found great "Ice Breaker" questions at several different websites. I actually copied and pasted questions from several sites as a document, but if you prefer, you can find ready to print questions here.
I wanted to use some questions that weren't part of that beautifully done PDF so I had to come up with my own thing. I wanted all of the questions to be the same size. I thought about using old playing cards but decided that might be more work than I was ready for.
As I was digging for ideas, I came across some scrapbook paper that was about 4x4 in size. They came in a pack of scraps for embellishing the scrapbook albums that I've not had the time to work on for a couple of years now.
I had several different sizes . . .
and colors.
I decided to write the questions on the smaller pieces of paper and adhere them to the 4x4.
I had some fun with the colorful papers. It's been a while since I've done any paper crafting. It was fun to create again. I need to do it more often.
I even added extra embellishments to some of them. Here they are in the basket. I had a basket of cards at each fondue pot. We only got through a few questions. I found that the questions would often lead to other questions from the ladies themselves which began a conversation that allowed the ladies to get to know one another.
I've been trying to decide what activity to do for our March get together. If inspiration doesn't come, I may just pull the baskets out of the closet and see where the conversation goes again.
Have any of you had a Fondue Party? Did you play a game? What did you do? What did you serve with your fondue?
