If you want to get in on the Follower Giveaway, there’s still time to enter!

And please go check out our upcoming event, Stashtacular! It’s a brilliant 4 week celebration designed to get you using that stash! There are TWO fabric swaps (US and International), we’ll be providing you with 3 tutorials a week plus some really awesome prizes from our sponsors at 1Choice4Quilting and the Fat Quarter Shop!

And imagine how flattered I was to discover last night that Kim from Everything Etsy had featured me in her 101 Summer Sewing Roundup! Please go look – there are some links to awesome tutorials that I knew nothing about.

And now on to the real post – I know this isn’t very quilty or crafty, but I wanted to share the concept with you in case you’d like to start organising one of your own.

Have you ever heard of a Pudding Party? I guess the North Americans might call it a Dessert Party. The idea is that each couple brings a pudding for everyone to try, and fill out a ballot giving it scores. The scores are added up at the end, and the winner has to host the next one. There’s a theme every time that you must try to ‘match’. But if you have a big group it’s probably best to divide it into Starters and Puddings – no one can eat 9 puddings in a row and not feel a bit queasy.

So really what you want is 2nd place so that you know everyone liked it, but you don’t have to host the next one. We have won 3 times. The first time I was in the States, so our lovely friend Ele made a chocolate mousse for Mike which was so nice it won.

So we had to host the next one. There are at least 18 people although it’s rare for everyone to attend. Here is my living room:

Can you imagine fitting 18 people in here? There LITERALLY were people sitting on the stairs. It was a bit cleaner than it is today. Oh my goddess it was so embarrassing. Everyone else seems to have a huge, beautiful house. I really need to get on with writing that craft book so we can move.

Anyway, last summer we won again. I tried to find a picture but couldn’t so I’ll just tell you I used a Barefoot Contessa coconut cake recipe, for which I had a bag of sweetened coconut sent from the States. The theme was ‘World Cup’ so I dyed some of the coconut red and created an English cross on the cake. It was delicious, if I do say so myself.

So we attended one last Saturday. I didn’t know what the theme was until that day. I was originally going to make fudge, but what does fudge have to do with British Summer Sport? My next idea was to do cupcakes and decorate them with tennis rackets and such. But the writing icing I bought tasted faintly of dirt, so I just piped the chocolate icing on and placed them on a tray with a Union flag tea towel. When we arrived our friend Rob suggested they were World Cupcakes. Awesome.

Someone made a tennis court:

And one couple brought a fish pate which he had made from a fish he caught and smoked. It was soooo good!

Sometimes the questions are quite whimsical. On Saturday one of the questions was ‘If you lit it on fire, what fruit would it remind you of? A)Bilberry B)Melon, etc’

Pudding parties are a lot of fun, and they’re the only competitive thing I do. I am a very bad loser. And even though I know it’s going to be a nightmare trying to host it in my house, I get a secret thrill when we win. Pathetic, isn’t it?

© J C Excell, 2011