Creatively Catering For Children's Birthday Parties

Today, we had a buffet at the One of the deaf centres in the north west. The style we chose was one of creativity and harnessing the power of food through colour and design. The one thing to thank nature for is that its endowed us with food with a wide array of tastes and shapes as it is of its colour and texture. Kid’s buffets are now expected to be healthy and rightly so. We all want our kids to face up to the future with confidence. The one thing we would advise if you are doing the buffet yourself is to get some part of it involve the children themselves. It’s one small way of connecting how and why we eat to what and where we eat. The other important feature is appeal through colour and design. Lastly is the often subtle portion size that it turns out carries as much weight as all the other great features that define a great children’s party event buffet. So we put this test to ourselves today and wow… See the picture below… and follow the video on YouTube. We highlight some of the features we considered in getting this picture perfect spread. If you love, why not drop us an email with a thank you or alternatively a send us your buzzing ideas so we can share them on your behalf

Anyway… Here We Go!

Appealing to Kids Through Visual Creativity

For Us at Benons Catering, we considered this the most crucial part of a kid’s party. Kids have to walk through the room and be able to use their senses of smell and sight and capture that wow moment that invites them into the moment. We all tend to eat with our eyes anyway for children, this is more particularly important. Nice great looking food arranges with respect to colour and shape contours respecting the food’s nature flow is essential in capturing kids’ moods.

Here we harness the natural colour of the white and brown breads plus the browning of the pork pies and sausage rolls. Arguably kids will naturally be attracted to the snack selection but with the sandwiches full of healthy fillings such as tuna and sweetcorn, salmon and cheese, etc, before too long, these go too…

We’ve used the three tired cardboard stands available from many high street stores to great appeal. We’ve been careful not to alienate children with exotic items, but rather stay within the confines of their comfort with bit more familiar items, such as the cocktail sausages, and porkpies and healthy filled bagels something that was effective for this event.

Set Your Eye on Portion Size

With the looming obesity crisis, its incumbent on event organisers to innovate in creating healthy spreads. Perhaps with ease is portion control for children. Now, there are a few basic principles to follow to make sure the party goes smoothly and I think the key thing to remember is portion control. No matter the size of your event, be it four, eight, 40 children or even more, there are some basic guides as to what is optimal as in what each child should have i.e. approximately one small bread roll or three quarters of a sandwich, a small cake, a packet of crisps and a few pieces of fruit. It’s important to keep within these constraints if there is to be any success in controlling the portion size each child gets.

Turn Common Foods Into Interesting Appeals

The common kids party food items still often end up the waste bin as they do not appeal to the intended recipients be it children or adults.

On this occasion, it’s easy to see how we have well harnessed the colours the brown and white breads come with. We’ve thrown in some bagels for the bread fussy kids. The fillings were chosen and made to fit both healthy and tasty roles. A salad sandwich might be healthy but it’s unlikely to cut across many children’s tastes. That fact we all know. So Why not consider a light mayonnaise coleslaw like we did?

We show you how we arranged the food on the tired display with the pre-cut triangular sandwiches arranged to leave gaps so they’re seen easily and picked to choice. They are arranged for maximum visual effect. You can see we have a nice rotating tire arrangement. The same is done for all the all the foods.

We have halved the pork pies to better portion it because a full one can quickly add up to over potion. As an extra, we realise parents sometimes may want to stick around so a brew and biscuit is in order. Just a simple kettle, flasks and sundries is all that’s needed and while they chat away, the biscuits do their job. Other items that you might want to consider are the ever innocent strawberry and marshmallow on sticks again a mixture of something good and something nice. For the strawberries, just cut these in half because they can be quite big and over bearing. This is a really simple give away just as little as 10 minutes for a 30 guest buffet and they'll be ready to serve. What you end up with is a great array of tires of food of a delicious spread from the traditional to the faintly exotic including sandwiches, snacks, nibbles, fruits, salads which sure children are going to love.

We have put together a display that harnesses creativity with the power of food. So, as you can see, with a few simple tips, you can really make sure your kids' birthday party go with a bang ensuring it hits the right notes with the children and their friends and that's just one way you to deliver an awesome kids' party really.