Fondue Fun

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?