We Build a Snackadium For the Playoffs

Our Denver Broncos might have fumbled away the playoffs yesterday in overtime, but my 16yo daughter A- and I had plenty of time to build our snackadium, a stadium made out of snack foods. In fact, we spent much of this afternoon having a really fun time taking a bunch of common foods from the market and transforming them into our vision of a football stadium, complete with the players, a crowd and a parking lot overflowing with snacks!

To start with, here’s our palette, mostly products from Pillsbury, the sponsor of our snackadium adventure:

Going clockwise from the top, it’s Pillsbury pizza dough, crescent rolls, pretzels in a bowl, Gardetto’s Original Recipe snacks, Bugles, Twizzlers, a bag of sliced bread, Fruit by the Foot, green sugar sprinkles (you can see the pink lid), Red Vines and Haribu gummy bears. In the middle are long skewers and toothpicks. Oh, and under the Bugles is a foil tray.

First step was to make some of the fancy parts, starting with cheery pennants. To make them, I used a toothpick, a short portion of Fruit by the Foot folded onto itself and a knife to cut it to an interesting shape:

Surprisingly easy to make a batch of these flags, which we then put aside so we could make the goalposts. Out of… Well, have a look:

You can see we disagreed on the size of the goal posts, first off, but we made them the same way: cutting segments of black licorice and pushing toothpicks through to make them reasonably rigid. The problem we found was that the larger the goalposts, the heavier they were, which left us with some structural problems down the road. For now, however, the smaller goalpost won and the bigger one was reengineered to match (though I originally had visions of using a cinematic foreshortening to emphasis perspective, but that didn’t really work so well).

You can’t have a stadium without bleachers, and you can’t have a game without fans, right? So that’s where more toothpicks and gummy bears came into the picture…

This close up, it’s slices of bread and gummy bears. Later, though, you’ll see that it actually works out pretty well as a crowd eager to watch the kickoff, just seconds away in our snackadium!

Meanwhile, we needed a field, the center of any stadium, and for that we spread the pizza dough out on the tray and baked it at 400F for 10-15 minutes or so.  We popped it out of the small tray and put it on a much larger foil-covered tray, with more of the bread bleachers stacked behind:

Still doesn’t look like much, but give us a bit more time!

From this point, the assembly went really fast as we used the green sugar sprinkles as grass, pretzel sticks to denote the 50-yard line, the little red vines as players and a huge number of gummy bears as the cheering fans. Here’s a shot with A- placing one of the last fans on the bleachers. You can see lots of progress between that last photo and this one:

Notice how the Fruit by the Foot flags add a festive air, and how inverted bugles mark the top of each bleacher area. Also note the yellow toothpick that’s keeping the goal post from falling backwards. I mentioned that earlier, right? 🙂

Here’s a shot that we call “view from the bleachers”, what the gummy bear fans would see of the game:

In this shot you can really see how great the green sugar sprinkles worked as grass for the field too!

And…

Ta daaaaa….

The final shot of the completed snackadium, in all its snacky glory!

Look closely at it and you’ll see the crescent rolls were cut in half and used to denote the corners of the field, that behind the end zone on each side are piles of tasty Gardetto’s snacks and just how many darn gummy bear fans we added to the stadium. I think we did a great job and made a bang-up snackadium. What do you think?

I’ll say this, it was some of the most fun my 16yo daughter and I have had together for a while and the fact that simultaneous to this she juiced a bunch of greens and I made a big pot of matzoh ball soup with freshly cooked chicken? That just showed that we could very effectively multitask in the kitchen!

Thanks to Pillsbury for sponsoring our snackadium construction project too!

I have partnered with Pillsbury through DailyBuzz to help promote their Crescent Roll and Pizza Crust products. I have been compensated for my time commitment to work with this product. However, my opinions are entirely my own and I have not been paid to publish positive comments. Thank you Pillsbury for this awesome opportunity to create a Snackadium!