Adding Theatre to your Dinner Party with Arts and Crafts

You’ve read the books, and you’ve tried many different recipes, you’ve found your skill level and have an idea of what you can cook, but when preparing a recipe for your next dinner party, you felt a bit, well, bored. You’re confident enough in your abilities not to be concerned about making something that people won’t enjoy, but you’ve been making the same dishes for a while now and want to spice things up figuratively. Adding some theater to your cooking can be a great way to stick to the flavors you love while stunning frequent dinner party guests or new friends. You’ll be happy to hear that doing this doesn’t have to be too complicated or expensive!

Design

Your eye for food design may be improved simply by being a fan of Masterchef Australia, but a lot of people may find Michelin-Esque simplicity a bit boring or restrictive. If this is you, don’t worry, there are many ways of working with the design of your food and eating environment that can give your dinner parties a highly personal touch.

The Opportunity of Theme

Try theming your meals. You don’t have to go as far as The Fat Duck in the UK assembling a miniature forest with scented dry ice, but considering a color scheme for dishes can help give the dinner a congruence. Using your eye for arts and crafts can come in handy here. Try to create a table design that matches your color scheme. This can be as simple as napkins and tablecloth colors, but if your theme is a bit more complicated, it could be enjoyable to go to a pottery café and personally paint a serving dish. You could go as far as creating a 3D section of the table with paper-mâché. For example, if you’re having a traditional Italian dinner, you could impress your guests with unique napkin designs, and create some undulating hills on one side of the table for your green tablecloth to transform into the Umbrian countryside.

If you’re a keen baker, you can make your dessert incredibly special by making your own silicone cake moulds. Silicone is great as it doesn’t emit any fumes or react with any ingredients. It’s also fantastic as it allows you to create cake castings and mouldings yourself. With liquid rubber castings and mouldings from Rowe Trading, you can create a highly-personal cake shape, be it for cupcakes or bigger loaves.

Napkin rings are another great opportunity to impress your guests. You can make rustic napkin rings easily with just toilet paper roll and jute string; but with burlap, lace or wire, you can fit your rings with your theme and create a multi-faceted experience.

Place names are an obvious candidate for personalization, but many people do this. To stand out, you could take advantage of the fact that they’re much more fun when they’re interactive. This could be in the form of a certain game, for example, getting guests to guess the codeword that represents them on the table.

However, you want to excite your dinner party guests, focus on presentation and taste. You can create an exciting dinner without being too complex, but the trick is to make each feature complement the others. If every element is simple, your meal can still have a powerful effect as long as nothing feels out of place.