Peppermint Party

I have been wanting to try my hand at a party theme post for a few months now and finally got up the guts to try it this week. Why peppermint? It’s pretty simple actually. My mom and I are both huge mint fans in general, and as I started sketching out a bunch of ideas for holiday parties, I just kept coming back and back and back to peppermint.

DIY & Decor

The streamers are red & white crepe paper twisted to look like peppermint. I made the pinwheels out of candy striped scrapbooking paper (grab the tutorial here), and I used wooden skewers and styrofoam balls hacksawed in half to display them, Candy Land-style on my table. As you can see, I also used a bag of peppermint candies to decorate my otherwise-bare tablescape.

The Food

Being a person with some blood sugar issues, I always have some kind of non-sugary snack at all parties I host. Usually, I just put out a bowl of nuts, but for this party, I had peppers on the brain. I made some hors d’oeurves with water crackers, cream cheese, and pepper slices arranged to look like peppermint swirl candies.

Drinks

I tried to come up with a tasty peppermint schnapps cocktail, but I realized I simply don’t like the kind of medicinal taste it makes me think of. My husband, in an effort to avoid trying my tenth attempt at a peppermint schnapps cocktail, pitched in on this one, making some peppermint tea syrup and designing a custom cocktail around it for my mini party. Here’s how he made the peppermint tea syrup, in his own words:

Make some tea. Put it in a [cooking] pot. Add one cup of sugar for each cup of tea. Put it on the burner until all the sugar dissolves, stirring occasionally to help the sugar blend. And that’s it.

Husband’s Custom Cocktail: The Candy Striper

ice

1 oz. peppermint tea syrup

1 oz. vodka

top with club soda

The peppermint tea syrup is quite sweet, so make sure to have plenty of club soda on hand to balance it out.

Desserts

What’s a holiday peppermint party without old school peppermint ice cream? To save time on the day of the party, I filled mini jelly jars with individual servings of peppermint ice cream and decorated each jar with red and white bakers twine the day before. This is probably my favorite idea from the whole shindig, imho.

I’m not the biggest fan of disposable dishware, so I opted to use the spoons I had on hand laid out next to the ice cream.

And I did end up putting my little fifth of peppermint schnapps to tasty use after all. Remember the peppermint schnapps swirl cupcakes from last week? I barely do, because husband and I ate them all in almost no time after I captured the pictures of this party. It turns out peppermint schnapps is best used as a peppermint extract alternative. Click here for the cupcake recipe, and here for info on substituting peppermint schnapps for peppermint extract.