Fondue Fun

We have been celebrating birthdays and father's day around here for the last few weeks. Rick turned 38 on Monday so we had a Fondue Fun dinner party on Saturday night for him at Lake Merritt.

We sent out invitations and then passed out more information to those who RSVP'ed yes. They got a little envelope that told them a little about what we were doing and a picture of the meeting place. We originally had 18 RSVP but ended up having 12-14 people come.

 Party invitation

Fondue Fun info and meeting location

Our meeting spots was the decorated trash can along Lake Merritt.

I teamed people us as the arrived to the meeting place. They got another envelope with instructions and clues on where to go. There were 15 different pictures of locations that they had to find around the lake. The pictures were slightly distorted in color and appearance to make it a little more difficult to figure out and to make it look a little fun. Each team had to find as many locations as they could and take a picture with group memebers in the picture using instagram. They had to load all the pictures to the same instagram site so everyone could follow the progress of the other teams. The last location - X marks the spot was the location of the fondue party.

 Clues and pictures of each location.

Here is our table of fondue fun.

These were the prizes for the winning team.

I made name tags for each person and put them on their fondue stick so no one would get confused on which stick was theirs.

I made some thank you for coming sour cream cups that were filled with lemon candies, and some personalized hershey kisses.

I  had a caramel and chcocolate fondue with strawberries, bannanas, pineapple, apples, yellow dye dipped marshmallows, toasted coconut and pecans.

We had lemonade with pomegranite seeds, mint leaves and lemon wedges.

I made a creamy cajun cheese fondue which had parmesan, asiago, provolone, fontina and herbed goat cheese in it. I served cajun chicken, penne pasta, cheese tortellini, broccoli and bread for dipping. I think it was a hit, it was gone pretty quickly.

This is the winning team with their prizes.

This is the second place team.

Standing around enjoying some company and some fondue.

It has been hot in Oakland for the last month or so and of course the one night we have our outdoor dinner party it is cold, overcast and windy. The wind kept blowing the sterno and tea lights out and our fondue was not heating up so well. We ended up running home to grab our Coleman camping stove to heat up the fondues and then used the sterno to keep them warm. While doing this the hot burner burnt our chocolate fondue. That is okay I guess there was plenty of the caramel to go around.

We had a fun time!