My daughter and I love to cook and are avid followers of the Foodnetwork's show Chopped" so it made perfect sense for us to create a "Chopped" themed 10th birthday party - a twist on a cooking party. We modeled it in many ways like the show where partners receive a "mystery basket"of ingredients and have 30 minutes to whip up a dish to impress a panel of judges (3 moms!)  Invitations: Invitations were made on microsoft word and had the shows "chopped" logo on it with a poem. It read: "Come join our party. The theme is "Chopped." It's a fun "cooking fest" with flair and pop.  With a basket of mystery ingredients to use go to town with a partner and make the dish you choose! We'll mix we'll pour we'll fry we'll bake we'll celebrate it all with ice cream and cake."  Decorations: Keep it simple with a few caddy's  of cooking utensils with balloons tied to them as center pieces and pre made paper chef hats sitting at each place at the table with store bought aprons draping on each chair.  Activities:  To kick it off the girls decorate the paper chef hats (easily made from white poster board and tissue paper) and store bought canvas aprons that partygoers took home as favors. Then start the cooking.  Divide the group into partners. Line up the mystery baskets you prepared in advanced in front of each set of partners.  (Use any basket covered with a cloth napkin and choose ingredients that are easy to work with. Examples include: basket 1- cooked chicken cut up tub of sour cream avocado; basket 2 - pillsbury pizza dough cup of crumbled bacon packet of dry ranch seasonings; basket 3 - box of brownies strawberries Redi whipped cream etc. The above produced chicken soft tacos with guacamole pizza withe bacon and a side salad with ranch dressing and brownies topped with strawberries and whipped cream.) The mystery baskets should contain different ingredients that kind of steer the kids in a direction while still making it challenging and there should be a variety of ingredients to create savory and sweet items to eat and enjoy afterwards. Once you say "go" partners open up the basket and decide what they wanted to make. They can use any other ingredients they wanted in the pantry or refrigerator as long as they used all the items in the basket and they plated enough for each of the other partners and the judges before time was up! Dishes were rated on taste presentation and creativity. Winning partners got "chopped"medals. We had a blast running into each other and ending it all with a huge spread of food that i did not have to prepare!  The girls were very proud of themselves and learned some things.  Games: we did a blind taste test where I set aside spoonfuls of items and each person had to guess a couple of them. (Items included: green olive cheese it cracker strawberry yogurt mustard celery cherry etc. Anything bite size where some are easy some gross.) Party snacks:  I set out 1 bowl of chips for the kids to snack on when they arrived and that is all since the whole point of the party is for them to create their own snacks. We had more than enough food!  Cake:  easy sheet cake decorated with a chef hat or no cake if you plant the fixings for cake cookies or brownies! Just stick candles into the brownie or cookie of the birthday girl and sing away!  Party favors: chef hat personalized apron bag with a recipe for cherry cheese cake bites a rubber spatula (I got them from Ikea for next to nothing) and a stack of printed cupcake papers. Easy and very economical!"