Planning a Decades Party
As scene on the October 13th episode of Access Hollywoood LIVE celebrating Billy Bush’s 40th Birthday, I have created great tips and trends for throwing a Decades Party. This is a great theme party to throw for all ages: for birthdays, anniversaries, Halloween, etc.
When creating a decade’s party, you may choose one decade to focus on or encompass the decades of your choice into one event. You can build the event from one segment to the other in even time segments allowing guests to enjoy the eras one by one. You may also set up stations throughout the event with different food, music, games, and entertainment from each decade. Guests will have a chance to roam around the space enjoying the decades at their leisure.
When creating the menu, come up with creative new ways to serve your food. Take an old time classic like meat loaf and mashed potatoes and turn it into a bite sized passed hors d’ourves by altering the recipe to make a bite sized treat. Your guests will really enjoy the bite sized and single serving portion sizes. It will give them the opportunity to mingle around the party while also enjoying the mixture of sweet and savory food items.
To set the mood and tone of the event, encourage people to dress in the appropriate clothing for that decade. Be sure to set the mood with décor from that era as well. For example, if it is a 70s disco party, be sure to have a disco ball and ask the guest to wear bell bottoms, floral shirts, and platforms. Make play lists of your favorite music from that era and play them throughout the party. A great party favor would be to burn a CD with the party playlist and create a fun CD cover for the cases. It will be a great reminder for each guest about what a great time they had during the event.
Be sure when sending an invitation to your guests that you make sure that the invitation reads that it is a theme party. You do not want your guests showing up out of theme attire because they didn’t realize the logistics of the event. Be sure that the invitation fits within the theme and has design elements according to the decade. You can customize, print and send invitations from websites such as zazzle.com.
Create a multi-tier celebratory cake, dedicating each tier to a corresponding decade. The cake from Billy’s 40th Birthday Party was created using Wilton products. Wilton offers excellent products for easy cake decorating such as edible paper, pre-colored fondants, candy molds and melts, and decorative figurines. You may also add toys and small miscellaneous items to create a creative and fun dessert.
For more information on how I designed each decade, click the links below!
Billy Bush’s Decades Birthday Cake
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Decades Cake: Billy Bush’s 40th Birthday
Create a multi-tier celebratory, dedicating each tier to a corresponding decade. The cake from Billy’s 40th Birthday Party was created using Wilton products. Wilton offers excellent products for easy cake decorating such as edible paper, pre-colored fondants, candy molds and melts, and decorative figurines. You may also add toys and small miscellaneous items to create a creative and fun dessert.
For Billy’s 40th Birthday, I created a multi-layer cake which incorporated all of the monumental experiences that has happened over his 40 years, the things he loves, and the places he has been. He LOVED it!
Here is a step-by-step instruction on how I made this cake.
1. Using either foam cakes or your favorite flavored cake, make multiple cakes all different sizes. For this cake I used a 6″, 10″ and 14″ foam cake so Billy could keep the cake as a memento if he chose to. I covered each layer in white fondant to give it a clean palate for decorating.
2. Next, using colored fondant and edible paper from Wilton, I made city scapes, logos of his schools, banners, figurines of his
favorite things and placed them to harden on parchment paper covered boards.
3. Now comes the fun part, decorating each layer. According to what decade the layer was,
I decorated it with the figurines and edible fondant pieces to highlight the experiences in Billy’s life.
Here is the finished product!
