For our daughter’s seventh birthday party, we were faced with the task of coming up with a new and fun idea for her birthday party theme. We were trying to change course from the usual standby party themes of stuffed animal assembly, movie theatre gatherings, and a “design your own pottery” parties. These are all fun for the kids, but we were already exposed to these events from the prior months. Our options were limited as we had to host this party indoors and avoid repeating a theme to keep it fun for the kids.
We decided to run with a cooking theme as both of our children seem to enjoy spending time in the kitchen with mom and dad helping prepare meals. One of the favorite things my children like to prepare is a homemade pizza. Our daughter gave this idea to us as her party theme and overall it was a roaring success. I highly recommend this to any parent grasping for a fun cooking party, but caution to recruit additional help as this event requires work in the kitchen as well as someone to keep the kids entertained.
The party will not be launched successfully without some careful planning and research on your end. First you must determine the guest size in order to prepare your shopping list as well as invitations and party souvenirs. Our particular party involved a group size of twelve. You will want to consider sending out your invitations a few weeks in advance of your party. It is advisable to host the event on either a Saturday or Sunday as this will allow you to enlist the help of other adults. It helps to have at least two to three adults available to pull off a pizza party.
Once invitations are set, you want to consider shopping for your party souvenirs. Try and keep the party favor or souvenir idea to match your party theme. For a pizza party, a good souvenir is a child size white kitchen apron. Once you have the aprons purchased, you can stencil their names in paint or markers using fun colors. Get creative with the stenciling process by adding little flowers and other fun designs. If you want to spend additional money on the aprons, you could also have the children’s names embroidered. Finish up your party favors by purchasing little toys or candies that the kids can take home with them to remember their fun day. Remember that these are young children and they still expect the small bucket of treasure to take home with them!
Once you have purchased your party favors, prepare your shopping list. As the party host, you want to keep your pizza ingredients as simple as possible. Go with the basics for ingredients such as mozzarella cheese, pizza sauce, sausage, pepperoni, green pepper, and maybe black olives. For the pizza crust, go with the pre-baked personal mini size pizza crusts such as Boboli. I recommend against making your pizza dough when trying working with a good size party, as this can be a complex task and require more attention with the kids.
The morning of your party, assemble all of your ingredients into plastic bowls and cover with wrap. The sausage will obviously have to be pre-cooked and cooled prior to distributing into containers. Once the items are prepared in containers, place them in the refrigerator for later use.
Once the guests arrive, have one adult serve as chaperone or party host and lead the kids into games and music in another room, while you prepare the pizza assembly line. It might be a good idea to use a disposable table cloth or use material that can be wiped clean. Kids are very messy and will spill sauce and other ingredients everywhere.
The kids can then take their seats once the ingredients are set on the table and the oven is pre-heated. Each child will be given a pre-made pizza crust on a paper plate. They then can apply pizza sauce and follow up with any ingredient of their choosing. Once they complete their creation, place pizza onto cookie sheet and into oven. It is a good idea to assign each child a colored toothpick and insert into pizza so you can identify each child’s pie. Write down on a sheet of paper the child’s name with the color next to the name.
If you only have one oven, this process can be tricky as you will only be able to bake about six mini pizzas at one time. We were fortunate during this process as about half of our group finished really fast as the other group sort of took their time. It may be a good idea for one of the chaperones to use this down time by entertaining the kids with party games or music while waiting for the pizzas to finish.
Once the pizzas are all cooked, they can be served to your guests. Serve with juice and follow up with some tasty birthday cake. Wrap or contain any leftover pizza and send home with your guests when they leave.
