Cicco Creations

When I joined Pinterest a couple weeks ago, I was thrilled to discover thousands of wonderful recipes and decorating ideas…  Then I realized my opportunities to make all those wonderful ideas into a reality are limited.  After all, I can’t exactly make a batch of homemade snickers just for me and DH!  Well, I suppose I could, but I really shouldn’t.  But the Oscars were yesterday and I decided this was my chance! 

For the last few years, we have hosted an Oscar party.  The first year, we held it at our house, but co-hosted with some friends.  We did a pasta bar with a couple different types of sauce and toppings.  It was great, but simple.  Last year, we got creative with our menu and named everything after movies and actors.  I made these fun name cards to go with each dish.  Everyone got a real kick out of this last year, so I knew I had to do something special for this year’s party, too.

I didn’t want to re-do the same thing.  And I had a ton of Pinterest recipes I wanted to tryout.  A friend of mine suggested doing a red carpet theme where we ask everyone to dress up in formal attire.  I like that idea in theory, but I didn’t want to put anyone out over a Sunday afternoon party.  But, I did use that idea as the jumping off point.  I decided to go with a classic, good old fashioned, “Movie Night.”  For the food, I went for a gourmet/homemade concession stand.  I set-up a popcorn station with a huge bucket of fresh popcorn and lots of seasonings to choose from.  In fact, I pulled out my Pampered Chef spices and rubs so our guest had about two dozen flavors to choose from.  My mom made a batch of her melt-in-your-mouth delicious caramel corn. 

We also had a pretzel station with fresh made pretzel balls.  To keep them warm, I put them in a chafing dish.  In the same chafing dish was four small bowl with caramel, chocolate, butter cream, and cheese sauce.  Personally, I enjoyed my pretzels rolled in cinnamon sugar and then topped with butter cream.  So good and pretty popular.

I also made pizza bites.  I buy my pizza dough from WinCo because they make it fresh and bag it for sale.  I LOVE their pizza dough and we use it for pizzas and calzones fairly often.  I also used mini pepperoni’s to give them a special feel.  Those little guys are so cute! 

We also had fresh fruit, strawberry kabobs, little jars of movie candy, chocolate bowls filled with mousse and topped with movie candy, and cake batter muddy buddies.   Of course, we also had the homemade snickers I mentioned above.