I fulfilled a bucket list item of mine this past weekend by building a snack stadium. What’s that? You’ve never heard of such a thing? Well let me tell you, it’s a party hit! Essentially it’s a football stadium shaped vessel that holds every snack imaginable. Total awesomeness. My friends absolutely loved it, and you can bet it will make an appearance at every football party here on out until it dies.
Making a snack stadium definitely takes some planning…and a plethora of amazon deliveries to gather enough cardboard to build the structure. The Hubs called my stadium “collegiate sized” and has plans to build a larger, more permanent, structure out of wood for future use. For our purposes today, I’ll share how I built this one.
First step is making a “blueprint” and drawing out your structure on the base. It’s important at this phase to plan which snacks you’re going to put in which section, in order to plan wall height and section width accordingly. You don’t want a section to be too narrow or too shallow to hold each snack upright. Keep in mind the overall size of each section/stadium as a whole in relation to how many people you’re feeding and how many snacks you’ll have to buy/make to fill each section. My stadium size is approximately 20X16X8 and fed 8 adults, including one hungry pregnant lady, perfectly.
Phase two is lots of measuring and cutting. I started at field level and cut and glued each section one at a time. This gave the glue time to dry a little before adding on to the structure from the inside out.
I used regular old Elmer’s school glue only because my glue gun was non-functioning. I think hot glue would have been a better option, but the school glue worked just fine. I used painters tape to tape all the corners together while the glue dried. Once all the sections were assembled, and the glue dried overnight, I sealed each seam with a line of masking tape.
Phase three is covering the entire structure with foil. This is actually way more difficult than it sounds. If you want to re-use your snack stadium in the future, you need to get a nice, even, double layer of foil to protect the cardboard. My best advice is go very slowly, and be patient. Full disclosure: when all was said and done, my salsa and guacamole leaked, but the rest was perfectly sealed.
The final phase is to fill that sucker up! I’ve seen snack stadiums that cover the entire outside with snacks as well, but I ran out of cardboard base so we just did the inside. Here’s what we’re working with……..
Pretzel rods, tortilla chips, nacho cheese sauce, pretzel bites stuffed with cheese, carrots and celery sticks
Lil’ Smokies wrapped in bacon, salsa, french onion dip, and blue corn tortilla chips. The Hubs was kind of bummed there were no wings involved.
So there you have it! We drowned our Chargers-losing-in-overtime sorrows in snacks, and had a great Sunday with friends.
WHY FIT IN WHEN WE WERE BORN TO STAND OUT?
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Maribel Reyes says
When you posted this image on instagram yesterday, we were watching the games too and I shared it with my husband… all he could say -and he kept saying all day: “we have to try this!” “let me see that picture of the snack stadium again”… guess we are trying it pretty soon 😀
Christie Moeller says
Love this! So cute!
Wendy Chen says
Such a cool idea! Sharing on my FB page https://www.facebook.com/WendyfulWorld?ref=hl.
Jen says
I ate my share (plus some!) of those lil’ smokies wrapped in bacon. Yummmmmm.
Amanda Lynn says
It seems like you should be able to purchase a preconstructed one of these somewhere? Filling it would be much more fun than building it for me.
Nicole says
What a great idea! Nice job.