This past weekend our neighborhood held its annual block party and I put together a small snack table for the festivities!  You may remember last year’s Rainbow Dessert Table, but this year I decided to hold back a bit on the sweets since there are so many other goodies throughout the day.  And because Olympic Opening Ceremonies were held just the night before, it only seemed fitting to go with an Olympic theme.

In the morning, we started off with some Olympic Ring donuts (inspired by these).  Because nothing says Olympic athlete like starting your day off with donuts, right?  Even so, the kids really enjoyed them and since they were running around all day, they definitely burned off the sugar quickly!

In the afternoon, I set up a small snack table complete with our family’s game for the day – guessing the number of candies in each jar.  The kid with the closest guess gets to take home the entire jar (vase) of that particular candy!  I apologized profusely to the parents of the kids who won for the sugar highs they would likely be enduring over the next week!  The other snacks included a “gold medal” sugar cookie for each child who guessed, chips and Olympic Ring inspired chip dips, and “fish and chips” newspaper cones!

Every year I tell Mr. Lemon to not let me buy M&Ms for this game – they take forever to count out!

I really loved how these sugar cookie gold medals turned out.  The stars were made with yellow Wilton Candy Melts:  I melted them, spread them out in a thin layer on a sheet of wax paper, sprinkled a generous amount of gold sugar sprinkles on top and let them re-harden.  After that, I cut them with a small star cookie cutter.  My original intention was to make homemade sugar cookies, but rules intentions are made to be broken, right?  In a last minute dash to the store, we simply bought the store’s homemade version (which are actually really good).  Since their sugar cookies are very soft, I was able to spear them with a chopstick to create a hole for the ribbon to thread through (if I’d made my own, I would have cut the hole before baking them).  Then the stars were attached with a bit of icing.  Voila!

This next photo may have been one of my very favorite ideas.  And it was certainly Mr. Lemon’s favorite – he laughed quite a bit when I told him my plan.  Since the Olympics are being held in London this year, I wanted something with a British flair and what is more British than traditional Fish and Chips?  Because I didn’t want to actually serve fried fish and french fries, I came up with the snack version – pretzel Goldfish and kettle chips in newspaper cones!

Inspired by this photo, I also decided to create Olympic Ring chip dips!  I had no problems with most of the colors – hummus for yellow, salsa for red, guacamole for green and black bean hummus for black – but was completely stumped for blue.  So, I just added a little food coloring to some sour cream.  Surprisingly, the kids were completely weirded out by this!

I’ve been dying to make an old school paper chain garland and this seemed like the perfect opportunity since the chains would again echo the Olympic Rings.  This was such an easy and relaxing project that I will definitely be making them again!

And here is the fabric Olympic poster that I picked up in London on our trip earlier this year!  I was so thrilled to find a fabric version that it would easily travel with us throughout England and France and then on the way home.  It really created the perfect backdrop!