You all met San Francisco 49ers fan Mia last year when she was featured in our fan series. Well, she’s back again sharing the snack stadium she built last season with tips on how you can build your own too. Check it out!
Last year, my Niners were in the Super Bowl. Let’s just…not talk about this year, okay? My fiancé (a Rams fan, unfortunately) and I had wanted to go to a Super Bowl party, as we had done the year before. Every year before that, we’d usually just stock up on a few snacks and order a takeaway to watch the game at home.
But after going to a brilliant SB party at the Brotherhood sports bar in Manchester, run by the Gridiron and Gravy guys, our old tradition of snacks and a takeaway sounded a bit boring. And, after seeing a (definitely targeted) ad on Facebook with a picture of an epic snack stadium, I came up with the bright idea of making my own version. Shoutout to my FBI guy who clearly heard me talking about snack stadiums to my other half and gave me the push I needed with that targeted ad – you’re the real MVP of this story!
Now, I’ve done a research Master’s degree, so I probably went a little overboard on researching the best way to pull this crazy snack stadium idea together. But it paid off, I guess! And it ended up being a very cheap little project, too.
When we went shopping, I cornered one of the poor, unsuspecting Asda workers, and asked him if they had any spare small cardboard boxes (in particular, the small, angled ones the confectionary are displayed in). He was a little gem, and disappeared into the abyss of the warehouse, and came back with an armful of them. He also said I was welcome to grab any empty ones that were on the shelves, too.
We came home with our shopping and a few too many cardboard boxes of various shapes and sizes. Which was perfect, because everything else I needed, we already had in the house. And then I set to work taking over our entire dining table for a few days, putting it all together.
First, I broke down a large cardboard box, and used one big, flat rectangle as the base of the stadium. I then sized out the ‘field’ area in the middle (where I would be putting the chocolate brownie cake covered with green icing), and attached the confectionary boxes to each other with tape, placing them along the sides of the ‘field’ – 4 boxes along the length, 2 boxes at each end zone. I stuck these down with tape, as well.
After that, I connected the confectionary parts with cardboard I measured and cut to size, and sellotaped them together. Voila, the bare bones of the stadium!
But it doesn’t look very snazzy at this point. It just looks like cardboard and a tin tray. And it’s not idea for holding food yet. So, out comes the tinfoil. A lot of it. The foiling probably took the longest to do out of this whole project, to be honest. I did it in small sections, making sure it was tucked into corners properly, and in some areas I did a double layer (like the four big corners, where hot pizza or heavier things like cans of drinks were going to be).
I’d be glad to never deal with tinfoil again in my life after that. But it served its purpose, and after that was done, I used a flat piece of cardboard, plus four thin strips with the ends bent over to attach to the underside. That was taped to the sides of one of the ‘stands’ sections, for stability. I only planned to put little pots of Skittles on top of the upper level anyway, so it didn’t have to be super sturdy.
Once that was all done, I used PlastiKote Stone Effect spray in ‘Manhattan Mist’ from the Range to make the outside of the stadium look less…carboardy. Then left my masterpiece alone to dry for awhile.
While that was doing its thing, I printed off the team flags and the stadium sign, which were glued to a foiled piece of cardboard, plus a few mini Super Bowl posters from Google Images. Then, I attached them with string to paper straws. Once the stadium was dry, up they went.
The best part came on Super Bowl Sunday though – filling it with snacks! There was just the two of us, so we kinda did go a bit overboard. But like after Christmas dinner, it kept us stocked up for lunchtimes for the rest of the following week, at least!
I made sandwiches, pizza, nuggets and chips, as well as a the chocolate brownie decorated as the field, with crushed Digestive biscuit base (Digestives and melted butter) for the endzones with straws made into the posts, which I mentioned earlier. The rest of the sections were filled with cans of Coke Zero, veg sticks, fruit, various sweets, crisps, Oreos and tortilla chips. I had a bunch of little medicine pots, which I filled with Skittles, and used to decorate the upper level.
And that was it! It took pride of place on the dining table, with condiments, cutlery etc around it in extra boxes I’d tinfoiled. Can’t lie, I was pretty damn proud of how it turned out! And of course I had to keep it, after all the work that went into making it (looking at you, tinfoil).
I’ll be going through the arduous task of refoiling the inside this coming week, ready to refill it with snacks for this year’s Super Bowl! Sadly, I’ll have to replace my Niners’ flags with the Buccs’ ones this time. I definitely plan to be reusing my Niner flags in the Super Bowl Snack Stadium soon though! #FTTB