How to Throw a Winter Party | Yummy Bites

This week I've been sharing how I put together a "Cozy Winter Social". It was a perfectly fun way to distract myself while my husband was out of town. If you want to see the other stages of putting the party together, check out my posts from the rest of this week!

For my awesome winter party, I wanted to keep the food nice and white without going overboard on sweets (which is surprisingly hard to do with parties). Even more than the food itself, I wanted to presentation to be simple and sweet.

To set up the h'orderves, I pushed the long side of my kitchen table against a wall and draped it with a white lacy tablecloth. (I'll talk about the non-food-related decorations in another post, so you'll have to wait for those!) I used only glass or white ceramics to hold my food, and I used round dishes to give a cohesive feel to the various dishes. My Main Man thought it would be funny to buy me a can of spray snow for one of my stocking stuffers this Christmas. Well I showed him and used it to frost the edges of my glass dishes! I also layered my dishes to give the whole set-up lots of dimension. I wanted to present all of the food in small portions, so I created simple paper cones to hold the popcorn with my favorite masking paper cut into 7"x7" squares. 

My really awesome friends, Beautiful Brunette and my Colorado Home-Girl (yes, you two just got nicknames) were sweet enough to bring dishes to share. Beautiful Brunette brought potato chips with dip and my Colorado Home-Girl brought chocolately marshmallows. They even both brought perfectly matching dishes to boot! The dishes I prepared were kettlecorn popcorn, egg salad sandwiches (quartered), veggies with ranch dressing, and some pretty awesome cupcakes. Here's time for a little confession: my cupcake batter was out-of-the-box funfetti with pre-made cream cheese frosting and store-bought silver sprinkles. But you know what? With a little artistic frosting application and some cute toothpick flags, they were still awesome! 

To keep my ladies hydrated, I filled two carafes. One had water spiced up with cucumber and lemon slices. The other carafe had lemonade (yep, it was the powdered kind that you simply add water to) that I accentuated with lemon slices and some muddled mint leaves. To my happy surprise, the lovely Winter, a fellow blogger over at The Redd Party, brought some sparkling grape juice to give a little excitement to our drinks (she is also responsible for a number of pictures in this week's posts, so give her lots of love)! 

(Above) Daytime vs. (Below) During the party with candlelight

I love food and I think it is a great social lubricant, so I was so excited to plan the menu for this shindig. What other bites do you find particularly awesome for parties?